retes of Alexis" is a receipt "to dissolve and
reducte golde into a potable licour, which conserveth the youth and
healthe of a man, and will heale every disease that is thought
incurable, in the space of seven daies at the furthest." The receipt,
however, is a highly complicated one, the gold being acted upon by juice
of lemons, honey, common salt, and _aqua vitae_, and distillation
frequently repeated from a "urinall of glass"--as the oftener it is
distilled the better it is. "Thus doyng," it is said, "ye shall have a
right naturall, and perfecte potable golde, whereof somewhat taken alone
every monthe once or twice, or at least with the said licour, whereof we
have spoken in the second chapter of this boke, is very excellent to
preserve a man's youthe and healthe, and to heale in a fewe daies any
disease rooted in a man, and thought incurable. The said golde will also
be good and profitable for diverse other operations and effectes: as
good wittes and diligent searchers of the secretes of nature may easily
judge." A further allusion to gold as a medicine is probably made in
"All's Well that Ends Well" (v. 3), where the King says to Bertram:

"Plutus himself,
That knows the tinct and multiplying medicine,
Hath not in nature's mystery more science,
Than I have in this ring."

Chaucer, too, in his sarcastic excuse for the doctor's avarice, refers
to this old belief:

"And yet he was but esy of despence:
He kept that he wan in the pestilence.
For gold in physic is a cordial;
Therefore he loved it in special."

Once more, in Sir Kenelm Digby's "Receipts" (1674), we are told that the
gold is to be calcined with three salts, ground with sulphur, burned in
a reverberatory furnace with sulphur twelve times, then digested with
spirit of wine "which will be tincted very yellow, of which, few drops
for a dose in a fit vehicle hath wrought great effects."

The term "grand liquor" is also used by Shakespeare for the _aurum
potabile_ of the alchemist, as in "Tempest" (v. 1):

"Where should they
Find this grand liquor that hath gilded them?"

_Good Year._ This is evidently a corruption of _goujere_, a disease
derived from the French _gouge_, a common camp-follower, and probably
alludes to the _Morbus Gallicus_. Thus, in "King Lear" (v. 3), we read:

"The good-years shall devour them, flesh and fell,
Ere they shall make us weep."