tus; that he must make gold, because, though he squandered all
his money, he had always money in hand; and that he kept a
"devil's-bird," a familiar spirit, in the pommel of that famous long
sword of his, which he was only too ready to lug out on provocation--the
said spirit, Agoth by name, being probably only the laudanum bottle with
which he worked so many wondrous cures, and of which, to judge from his
writings, he took only too freely himself.

But the charm of Paracelsus is in his humour, his mother-wit. He was
blamed for consorting with boors in pot-houses; blamed for writing in
racy German, instead of bad school-Latin: but you can hardly read a
chapter, either of his German or his dog-Latin, without finding many a
good thing--witty and weighty, though often not a little coarse. He
talks in parables. He draws illustrations, like Socrates of old, from
the commonest and the oddest matters to enforce the weightiest truths.
"Fortune and misfortune," he says, for instance nobly enough, "are not
like snow and wind, they must be deduced and known from the secrets of
nature. Therefore misfortune is ignorance, fortune is knowledge. The
man who walks out in the rain is not unfortunate if he gets a ducking."

"Nature," he says again, "makes the text, and the medical man adds the
gloss; but the two fit each other no better than a dog does a bath;" and
again, when he is arguing against the doctors who hated chemistry--"Who
hates a thing which has hurt nobody? Will you complain of a dog for
biting you, if you lay hold of his tail? Does the emperor send the thief
to the gallows, or the thing which he has stolen? The thief, I think.
Therefore science should not be despised on account of some who know
nothing about it." You will say the reasoning is not very clear, and
indeed the passage, like too many more, smacks strongly of wine and
laudanum. But such is his quaint racy style. As humorous a man, it
seems to me, as you shall meet with for many a day; and where there is
humour there is pretty sure to be imagination, tenderness, and depth of
heart.

As for his notions of what a man of science should be, the servant of
God, and of Nature--which is the work of God--using his powers not for
money, not for ambition, but in love and charity, as he says, for the
good of his fellow-man--on that matter Paracelsus is always noble. All
that Mr. Browning has conceived on that point, all the noble speeches
which he has put into