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."
THE ALCHYMISTS.