fair
feres," answered the Nevile, debonairly smoothing his lawn partelet.

CHAPTER IV. EXHIBITING THE BENEFITS WHICH ROYAL PATRONAGE CONFERS ON
GENIUS,--ALSO THE EARLY LOVES OF THE LORD HASTINGS; WITH OTHER MATTERS
EDIFYING AND DELECTABLE.

The furnace was still at work, the flame glowed, the bellows heaved;
but these were no longer ministering to the service of a mighty and
practical invention. The mathematician, the philosopher, had descended
to the alchemist. The nature of the TIME had conquered the nature of
a GENIUS meant to subdue time. Those studies that had gone so far
to forestall the master-triumph of far later ages were exchanged for
occupations that played with the toys of infant wisdom. O true Tartarus
of Genius, when its energies are misapplied, when the labour but rolls
the stone up the mountain, but pours water upon water through the sieve!

There is a sanguineness in men of great intellect which often leads them
into follies avoided by the dull. When Adam Warner saw the ruin of his
contrivance; when he felt that time and toil and money were necessary to
its restoration; and when the gold he lacked was placed before him as a
reward for alchemical labours, he at first turned to alchemy as he would
have turned to the plough,--as he had turned to conspiracy,--simply as a
means to his darling end. But by rapid degrees the fascination which all
the elder sages experienced in the grand secret exercised its witchery
over his mind. If Roger Bacon, though catching the notion of the
steam-engine, devoted himself to the philosopher's stone; if even in so
much more enlightened an age Newton had wasted some precious hours in
the transmutation of metals, it was natural that the solitary sage of
the reign of Edward IV. should grow, for a while at least, wedded to a
pursuit which promised results so august. And the worst of alchemy is,
that it always allures on its victims: one gets so near and so near the
object,--it seems that so small an addition will complete the sum!
So there he was--this great practical genius--hard at work on turning
copper into gold!

"Well, Master Warner," said the young goldsmith, entering the student's
chamber, "methinks you scarcely remember your friend and visitor,
Nicholas Alwyn?"

"Remember, oh, certes! doubtless one of the gentlemen present when they
proposed to put me to the brake [the old word for rack]. Please to stand
a little on this side--what is your will?"

"I am not