her mancies--there was then a whole literature about them. And the
witch-burning inquisitors like Sprenger, Bodin, Delrio, and the rest,
believed as firmly in the magic powers of the poor wretches whom they
tortured to death, as did, in many cases, the poor wretches themselves.

Everyone, almost, believed in magic. Take two cases. Read the story
which Benvenuto Cellini, the sculptor, tells in his life (everyone should
read it) of the magician whom he consults in the Coliseum at Rome, and
the figure which he sees as he walks back with the magician, jumping from
roof to roof along the tiles of the houses.

And listen to this story, which Mr. Froude has dug up in his researches.
A Church commissioner at Oxford, at the beginning of the Reformation,
being unable to track an escaped heretic, "caused a figure to be made by
an expert in astronomy;" by which it was discovered that the poor wretch
had fled in a tawny coat and was making for the sea. Conceive the
respected head of your College--or whoever he may be--in case you slept
out all night without leave, going to a witch to discover whether you had
gone to London or to Huntingdon, and then writing solemnly to inform the
Bishop of Ely of his meritorious exertions!

In such a mad world as this was Paracelsus born. The son of a Swiss
physician, but of noble blood, Philip Aureolus Theophrastus was his
Christian name, Bombast von Hohenheim his surname, which last word he
turned, after the fashion of the times, into Paracelsus. Born in 1493 at
Einsiedeln (the hermitage), in Schweiz, which is still a famous place of
pilgrimage, he was often called Eremita--the hermit. Erasmus, in a
letter still extant, but suspected not to be genuine, addressed him by
that name.

How he passed the first thirty-three years of his life it is hard to say.
He used to boast that he had wandered over all Europe, been in Sweden,
Italy, in Constantinople, and perhaps in the far East, with
barber-surgeons, alchemists, magicians, haunting mines, and forges of
Sweden and Bohemia, especially those which the rich merchants of that day
had in the Tyrol.

It was from that work, he said, that he learnt what he knew: from the
study of nature and of facts. He had heard all the learned doctors and
professors; he had read all their books, and they could teach him
nothing. Medicine was his monarch, and no one else. He declared that
there was more wisdom under his bald pate than in Aristotle and Galen,