JOHN FONTAINE.
The life of this artist is buried in the obscurity of his closet or laboratory, where he divided his time between attention to his furnaces and the composition of curious verses. He was alive at Valenciennes in the year 1413. His Hermetic poem, Aux Amoureux de Science, has been printed several times. The author announces that he is an adept, and describes in an allegorical manner, after the fashion of the “Romance of the Rose,” and in the same quaint and beautiful tongue, the different processes which enter into the art of transmutation. His little work may be profitably studied by the neophytes of practical alchemy, though its benefits are of a negative kind, but its paradise of dainty devices and its old world nature pictures are better suited to the poet and the poetic interpretation of symbols.