ny trouble about it; and allies on the continent, we have none, or, at
least, none that would raise an hundred men to save us from perdition,
unless we paid an extravagant price for their assistance.

"But, to return to this here Elixir of Long Life, I might embellish it
with a great many high-sounding epithets; but I disdain to follow the
example of every illiterate vagabond, that, from idleness, turns quack,
and advertises his nostrum in the public papers. I am neither a
felonious drysalter returned from exile, an hospital stump-turner, a
decayed staymaker, a bankrupt printer, or insolvent debtor, released by
act of parliament. I do not pretend to administer medicines without the
least tincture of letters, or suborn wretches to perjure themselves in
false affidavits of cures that were never performed; nor employ a set of
led captains to harangue in my praise at all public places. I was bred
regularly to the profession of chemistry, and have tried all the
processes of alchemy; and I may venture to say, that this here elixir
is, in fact, the chruseon pepuromenon ek puros, the visible, glorious,
spiritual body, from whence all other beings derive their existence, as
proceeding from their father the sun, and their mother the moon; from
the sun, as from a living and spiritual gold, which is mere fire;
consequently, the common and universal first-created mover, from whence
all moveable things have their distinct and particular motions; and also
from the moon, as from the wife of the sun, and the common mother of all
sublunary things.

"And forasmuch as man is, and must be, the comprehensive end of all
creatures, and the microcosm, he is counselled in the Revelation to buy
gold that is thoroughly fired, or rather pure fire, that he may become
rich and like the sun; as, on the contrary, he becomes poor, when he
abuses the arsenical poison; so that, his silver, by the fire, must be
calcined to a caput mortuum, which happens when he will hold and retain
the menstruum, out of which he partly exists, for his own property, and
doth not daily offer up the same in the fire of the sun, that the woman
may be clothed with the sun, and become a sun, and thereby rule over the
moon; that is to say, that he may get the moon under his feet. Now, this
here elixir, sold for no more than sixpence a phial, contains the essence
of the alkahest, the archaeus, the catholicon, the menstruum, the sun,
the moon, and, to sum up all in one word, is