Soon they had their revenge.  Ugly stories were whispered about.  Oporinus, the printer, who had lived with him for two years, and who left him, it is said, because he thought Paracelsus concealed from him unfairly the secret of making laudanum, told how Paracelsus was neither more nor less than a sot, who came drunk to his lectures, used to prime himself with wine before going to his patients, and sat all night in pothouses swilling with the boors.

Men looked coldly on him—­longed to be rid of him.  And they soon found an opportunity.  He took in hand some Canon of the city from whom it was settled beforehand that he was to receive a hundred florins.  The priest found himself cured so suddenly and easily that, by a strange logic, he refused to pay the money, and went to the magistrates.  They supported him, and compelled Paracelsus to take six florins instead of the hundred.  He spoke his mind fiercely to them.  I believe, according to one story, he drew his long sword on the Canon.  His best friends told him he must leave the place; and within two years, seemingly, after his first triumph at Basle, he fled from it a wanderer and a beggar.

The rest of his life is a blank.  He is said to have recommenced his old wanderings about Europe, studying the diseases of every country, and writing his books, which were none of them published till after his death.  His enemies joyfully trampled on the fallen man.  He was a “dull rustic, a monster, an atheist, a quack, a maker of gold, a magician.”  When he was drunk, one Wetter, his servant, told Erastus (one of his enemies) that he used to offer to call up legions of devils to prove his skill, while Wetter, in abject terror of his spells, entreated him to leave the fiends alone—­that he had sent his book by a fiend to the spirit of Galen in hell, and challenged him to say which was the better system, his or Paracelsus’, and what not?

His books were forbidden to be printed.  He himself was refused a hearing, and it was not till after ten years of wandering that he found rest and protection in a little village of Carinthia.

Three years afterwards he died in the hospital of St. Sebastian at Salzburg, in the Tyrol.  His death was the signal for empirics and visionaries to foist on the public book after book on occult philosophy, written in his name—­of which you may see ten folios—­not more than a quarter, I believe, genuine.  And these foolish books, as much as anything, have helped to keep up the popular prejudice against one who, in spite of all his faults was a true pioneer of science. {15} I believe (with those moderns who have tried to do him justice) that under all his verbiage and confusion there was a vein of sound scientific, experimental common sense.

When he talks of astronomy as necessary to be known by a physician, it seems to me that he laughs at astrology, properly so called; that is, that the stars influence the character and destiny of man.  Mars, he says, did not make Nero cruel.  There would have been long-lived men in the world if Saturn had never ascended the skies; and Helen would have been a wanton, though Venus had never been created.  But he does believe that the heavenly bodies, and the whole skies, have a physical influence on climate, and on the health of men.