He talks of alchemy, but he means by it, I think, only that sound science which we call chemistry, and at which he worked, wandering, he says, among mines and forges, as a practical metallurgist.

He tells us—­what sounds startling enough—­that magic is the only preceptor which can teach the art of healing; but he means, it seems to me, only an understanding of the invisible processes of nature, in which sense an electrician or a biologist, a Faraday or a Darwin, would be a magician; and when he compares medical magic to the Cabalistic science, of which I spoke just now (and in which he seems to have believed), he only means, I think, that as the Cabala discovers hidden meaning and virtues in the text of Scripture, so ought the man of science to find them in the book of nature.  But this kind of talk, wrapt up too in the most confused style, or rather no style at all, is quite enough to account for ignorant and envious people accusing him of magic, saying that he had discovered the philosopher’s stone, and the secret of Hermes Trismegistus; 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.