s.

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THE ALCHYMISTS;

or

Searchers for the Philosopher's Stone and the Water of Life.

_Mercury_ (_loquitur_). The mischief a secret any of them know,
above the consuming of coals and drawing of usquebaugh! howsoever
they may pretend, under the specious names of Geber, Arnold,
Lulli, or bombast of Hohenheim, to commit miracles in art, and
treason against nature! As if the title of philosopher, that
creature of glory, were to be fetched out of a furnace! I am their
crude and their sublimate, their precipitate and their unctions;
their male and their female, sometimes their hermaphrodite--what
they list to style me! They will calcine you a grave matron, as it
might be a mother of the maids, and spring up a young virgin out
of her ashes, as fresh as a phoenix; lay you an old courtier on
the coals, like a sausage or a bloat-herring, and, after they have
broiled him enough, blow a soul into him with a pair of bellows!
See, they begin to muster again, and draw their forces out against
me! The genius of the place defend me!--BEN JONSON'S _Masque:
Mercury vindicated from the Alchymists_.

Dissatisfaction with his lot seems to be the characteristic of man in all
ages and climates. So far, however, from being an evil, as at first might
be supposed, it has been the great civiliser of our race; and has tended,
more than any thing else, to raise us above the condition of the brutes.
But the same discontent which has been the source of all improvement, has
been the parent of no small progeny of follies and absurdities; to trace
these latter is our present object. Vast as the subject appears, it is
easily reducible within such limits as will make it comprehensive without
being wearisome, and render its study both instructive and amusing.

Three causes especially have excited the discontent of mankind; and, by
impelling us to seek for remedies for the irremediable, have bewildered us
in a maze of madness and error. These are death, toil, and ignorance of
the future--the doom of man upon this sphere, and for which he shews his
antipathy by his love of life, his longing for abundance, and his craving
curiosity to pierce the secrets of the days to come. The first has led
many to imagine that they might find means to avoid death, or failing in
this, that they might, nevertheless, so prolong existence as to reckon it
by centuries instead of uni