“I should like to see Master Warner again,” said Alwyn; “where lodges he?”
“Yonder, by the little postern, on the third flight of the turret that flanks the corridor, [This description refers to that part of the Tower called the King’s or Queen’s Lodge, and long since destroyed.] next to Friar Bungey, the magician; but it is broad daylight, and therefore not so dangerous,—not but thou mayest as well patter an ave in going up stairs.”
“Farewell, Master Nevile,” said Alwyn, smiling; “I will seek the mechanician, and if I find there Mistress Sibyll, what shall I say from thee?”
“That young bachelors in the reign of Edward IV. will never want fair feres,” answered the Nevile, debonairly smoothing his lawn partelet.
CHAPTER IV. EXHIBITING THE BENEFITS WHICH ROYAL PATRONAGE CONFERS ON GENIUS,—ALSO THE EARLY LOVES OF THE LORD HASTINGS; WITH OTHER MATTERS EDIFYING AND DELECTABLE.
The furnace was still at work, the flame glowed, the bellows heaved; but these were no longer ministering to the service of a mighty and practical invention. The mathematician, the philosopher, had descended to the alchemist. The nature of the TIME had conquered the nature of a GENIUS meant to subdue time. Those studies that had gone so far to forestall the master-triumph of far later ages were exchanged for occupations that played with the toys of infant wisdom. O true Tartarus of Genius, when its energies are misapplied, when the labour but rolls the stone up the mountain, but pours water upon water through the sieve!
There is a sanguineness in men of great intellect which often leads them into follies avoided by the dull. When Adam Warner saw the ruin of his contrivance; when he felt that time and toil and money were necessary to its restoration; and when the gold he lacked was placed before him as a reward for alchemical labours, he at first turned to alchemy as he would have turned to the plough,—as he had turned to conspiracy,—simply as a means to his darling end. But by rapid degrees the fascination which all the elder sages experienced in the grand secret exercised its witchery over his mind. If Roger Bacon, though catching the notion of the steam-engine, devoted himself to the philosopher’s stone; if even in so much more enlightened an age Newton had wasted some precious hours in the transmutation of metals, it was natural that the solitary sage of the reign of Edward IV. should grow, for a while at least, wedded to a pursuit which promised results so august. And the worst of alchemy is, that it always allures on its victims: one gets so near and so near the object,—it seems that so small an addition will complete the sum! So there he was—this great practical genius—hard at work on turning copper into gold!
“Well, Master Warner,” said the young goldsmith, entering the student’s chamber, “methinks you scarcely remember your friend and visitor, Nicholas Alwyn?”
“Remember, oh, certes! doubtless one of the gentlemen present when they proposed to put me to the brake [the old word for rack]. Please to stand a little on this side—what is your will?”