t of the Low Countries; writer on the occult
sciences and of the famous "De Vanitate Scientiarum," and what not? who
died miserably at the age of forty-nine, accused of magic by the
Dominican monks from whom he had rescued a poor girl, who they were
torturing on a charge of witchcraft; and by them hunted to death; nor to
death only, for they spread the fable--such as you may find in Delrio the
Jesuit's "Disquisitions on Magic" {14}--that his little pet black dog was
a familiar spirit, as Butler has it in "Hudibras":

Agrippa kept a Stygian pug
I' the garb and habit of a dog--
That was his taste; and the cur
Read to th' occult philosopher,
And taught him subtly to maintain
All other sciences are vain.

Such also was Jerome Cardan, the Italian scholar and physician, the
father of algebraic science (you all recollect Cardan's rule,) believer
in dreams, prognostics, astrology; who died, too, miserably enough, in
old age.

Cardan's sad life, and that of Cornelius Agrippa, you can, and ought to
read for yourselves, in two admirable biographies, as amusing as they are
learned, by Professor Morley, of the London University. I have not
chosen either of them as a subject for this lecture, because Mr. Morley
has so exhausted what is to be known about them, that I could tell you
nothing which I had not stolen from him.

But what shall I say of the most famous of these men--Paracelsus? whose
name you surely know. He too has been immortalised in a poem which you
all ought to have read, one of Robert Browning's earliest and one of his
best creations.

I think we must accept as true Mr. Browning's interpretation of
Paracelsus's character. We must believe that he was at first an honest
and high-minded, as he was certainly a most gifted, man; that he went
forth into the world, with an intense sense of the worthlessness of the
sham knowledge of the pedants and quacks of the schools; an intense
belief that some higher and truer science might be discovered, by which
diseases might be actually cured, and health, long life, happiness, all
but immortality, be conferred on man; an intense belief that he,
Paracelsus, was called and chosen by God to find out that great mystery,
and be a benefactor to all future ages. That fixed idea might
degenerate--did, alas! degenerate--into wild self-conceit, rash contempt
of the ancients, violent abuse of his opponents. But there was more than
this in Paracelsus. He had one id