Such, in the first half of the sixteenth century, was Cornelius Agrippa—­a doctor of divinity and a knight-at-arms; secret-service diplomatist to the Emperor Maximilian in Austria; astrologer, though unwilling, to his daughter Margaret, Regent of the Low Countries; writer on the occult sciences and of the famous “De Vanitate Scientiarum,” and what not? who died miserably at the age of forty-nine, accused of magic by the Dominican monks from whom he had rescued a poor girl, who they were torturing on a charge of witchcraft; and by them hunted to death; nor to death only, for they spread the fable—­such as you may find in Delrio the Jesuit’s “Disquisitions on Magic” {14}—­that his little pet black dog was a familiar spirit, as Butler has it in “Hudibras”: 

   Agrippa kept a Stygian pug
   I’ the garb and habit of a dog—­
   That was his taste; and the cur
   Read to th’ occult philosopher,
   And taught him subtly to maintain
   All other sciences are vain.

Such also was Jerome Cardan, the Italian scholar and physician, the father of algebraic science (you all recollect Cardan’s rule,) believer in dreams, prognostics, astrology; who died, too, miserably enough, in old age.

Cardan’s sad life, and that of Cornelius Agrippa, you can, and ought to read for yourselves, in two admirable biographies, as amusing as they are learned, by Professor Morley, of the London University.  I have not chosen either of them as a subject for this lecture, because Mr. Morley has so exhausted what is to be known about them, that I could tell you nothing which I had not stolen from him.

But what shall I say of the most famous of these men—­Paracelsus? whose name you surely know.  He too has been immortalised in a poem which you all ought to have read, one of Robert Browning’s earliest and one of his best creations.

I think we must accept as true Mr. Browning’s interpretation of Paracelsus’s character.  We must believe that he was at first an honest and high-minded, as he was certainly a most gifted, man; that he went forth into the world, with an intense sense of the worthlessness of the sham knowledge of the pedants and quacks of the schools; an intense belief that some higher and truer science might be discovered, by which diseases might be actually cured, and health, long life, happiness, all but immortality, be conferred on man; an intense belief that he, Paracelsus, was called and chosen by God to find out that great mystery, and be a benefactor to all future ages.  That fixed idea might degenerate—­did, alas! degenerate—­into wild self-conceit, rash contempt of the ancients, violent abuse of his opponents.  But there was more than this in Paracelsus.  He had one idea to which, if he had kept true, his life would have been a happier one—­the firm belief that all pure science was a revelation from God; that it was not to be obtained at second or third hand, by blindly adhering to the words of Galen or Hippocrates or Aristotle, and putting them (as the scholastic philosophers round him did) in the place of God:  but by going straight to nature at first hand, and listening to what Bacon calls “the voice of God revealed in facts.”  True and noble is the passage with which he begins his “Labyrinthus Medicorum,” one of his attacks on the false science of his day,