e enclosed in the dungeons of the Bastille
he should never see daylight again, he took his departure immediately and
proceeded to England. On his arrival in London he made the acquaintance of
the notorious Lord George Gordon, who espoused his cause warmly, and
inserted a letter in the public papers, animadverting upon the conduct of
the Queen of France in the affair of the necklace, and asserting that she
was really the guilty party. For this letter Lord George was exposed to a
prosecution at the instance of the French ambassador, found guilty of
libel, and sentenced to fine and a long imprisonment.

Cagliostro and the countess afterwards travelled in Italy, where they were
arrested by the Papal government in 1789, and condemned to death. The
charges against him were, that he was a freemason, a heretic, and a
sorcerer. This unjustifiable sentence was afterwards commuted into one of
perpetual imprisonment in the Castle of St. Angelo. His wife was allowed
to escape severer punishment by immuring herself in a nunnery. Cagliostro
did not long survive. The loss of liberty preyed upon his
mind--accumulated misfortunes had injured his health and broken his
spirit, and he died early in 1790. His fate may have been no better than
he deserved, but it is impossible not to feel that his sentence for the
crimes assigned was utterly disgraceful to the government that pronounced
it.

PRESENT STATE OF ALCHYMY.

We have now finished the list of the persons who have most distinguished
themselves in this unprofitable pursuit. Among them are men of all ranks,
characters, and conditions: the truth-seeking but erring philosopher; the
ambitious prince and the needy noble, who have believed in it; as well as
the designing charlatan, who has not believed in it, but has merely made
the pretension to it the means of cheating his fellows, and living upon
their credulity. One or more of all these classes will be found in the
foregoing pages. It will be seen, from the record of their lives, that the
delusion was not altogether without its uses. Men, in striving to gain too
much, do not always overreach themselves; if they cannot arrive at the
inaccessible mountain-top, they may perhaps get half way towards it, and
pick up some scraps of wisdom and knowledge on the road. The useful
science of chemistry is not a little indebted to its spurious brother of
alchymy. Many valuable discoveries have been made in that search for the
impossible, which mig