DEAR SIR,—When we met lately at the hospitable board of our common
friend, Benjamin Allen, Esq., lately elected Professor of Chemistry in
the University of London, our conversation turned (if you can pass me the
intoxicating favour of remembering it) on the glorious science of
chemistry. For me this knowledge has ever possessed irresistible
attractions, from the enormous power which it confers of heaping benefits
on the suffering race of mankind. Others may rejoice in the advantages
which a knowledge of it bestows—the power which can reduce a Hannibal to
the level of a drummer boy, or an all-pervading Shakspeare to the
intellectual estate of a vestryman, though it cannot at present reverse
those processes. The consideration of the destructive as compared with
the constructive forces of chemistry was present, as I recollect, to your
powerful intellect on the festive occasion to which I refer. “Yes!” you
said (permit me to repeat your very words)—“Yes, Count Fosco, Alexander’s
morning draught shall make Alexander run for his life at the first sound
of the enemy’s trumpet. So much chemistry can achieve; but can she help
as well as harm? Nay, can she answer for it that the lemon which
Professor Allen, from the best and purest of motives, has blended with
this milk-punch, shall not disagree with me to-morrow morning? Can
chemistry, Count Fosco, thus thwart malign constitutional tendency?”
These were your words, sir, and I am now ready to answer your
deep-searching question in the affirmative. Prolonged assiduous
application to my Art has shown me how to preserve the lemon in Milk
Punch, and yet destroy, or disengage, the deleterious elements. Will you
so greatly honour science, and Fosco her servant, as to sup with me on
the night of the twenty-fifth, at nine o’clock, and prove (you need not
dread the test) whether a true follower of knowledge or a vain babbler
signs—in exile—the name of