Let us add that the search for the philosopher’s stone was the constant occupation of many renowned doctors; every one had not that clear good sense, good humour and penetrating spirit which permitted Chaucer to smilingly unravel before us the mysteries of the alchemist, shaking the alembics and retorts, and in the odd-shaped apparatus which frightened the imagination, showing not the newly created ingot of pure metal, but the mixture prepared beforehand by the impostor.[458] Not a plant or a stone without supernatural virtues; the vain beliefs inherited from the ancients had been rejuvenated and expanded. People thirsted for such pretended learning. Gower thinks he does well to insert in a love poem all he believes he knows on the constitution of the world and the virtues of things;[459] even with professionally learned men the mass of fabulous statements fills volumes. Bartholomew the Englishman, whose work is an encyclopædia of scientific knowledge in the thirteenth century, is positive that the diamond destroys the effect of venom and of magic incantations, and that it reveals its wearer’s fear; that the topaz prevents sudden death, etc.[460]
A pleasure it is, and like a whiff of fresh air when emerging from a damp cellar, to remember that in an age not totally exempt from these weaknesses no one condemned them with more eloquence than our Molière: “Without speaking of other things,” said he, “I have {336} never been able to conceive how even the smallest peculiarities of the fortune of the least man could be found written in the skies. What relation, what intercourse, what correspondence can there be between us and worlds separated from our earth by so frightful a distance? and whence can this fine science have come to men? What god has revealed it? or what experience can have shaped it from the observation of that great number of stars which have not been seen twice in the same arrangement?”
61. A PARDONER (CHAUCER’S PARDONER).
(From the Ellesmere MS.)
Trouble and eloquence lost; there will always be a Timocles to observe with a wise air: “I am incredulous enough as to a great many things, but for astrology, there is nothing more certain and more constant than the success of the horoscopes which it draws.”[461]
So vanished into smoke the tempests which Chaucer, Langland, and Wyclif raised against the hypocritical pardoners of their day. They lingered on till the {337} sixteenth century, and then were entirely suppressed in the twenty-first session of the œcumenical council of Trent, July 16, 1562, Pius IV being Pope. It is stated in the ninth chapter of the “Decree of Reform,” published in that session, that since “no further hope can be entertained of amending the questors of alms” (eleemosynarum quæstores), otherwise pardoners, “the use of them and their name are entirely abolished henceforth in all Christendom:”[462] the first of old-time wayfarers to entirely disappear.
62. A PILGRIMAGE TOWN, ROCAMADOUR, IN GUYENNE.