"None can read save sorcerers; for Paracelsus on that day, at Basil, destroyed, with the works of Avicenna, the sole existing key thereto, and which was written on a blank leaf thereof."
"May the devil confound thee, Paracelsus, and the great pyramid to boot! I fear me much, thy musty magic will never cure the queen."
"I pardon your majesty's anger, for it hath its source in grief," replied John of the Silvermills, calmly; "nature is full of mysteries. Our cradle and our coffin may be formed from the same tree, and yet we be ignorant thereof. Paracelsus——"
"I say again, Mahound take Paracelsus! but what doth this trite remark mean?"
"That, like the mass of the unlettered world, your majesty scoffs at what appears incomprehensible, and——"
The apothegar paused, for the arras was raised by a hand covered by a glove of fine scarlet leather, and Cardinal Beaton, who at all hours had the entrée of the king's apartments, stood before them, and both king and subject knelt to kiss his ring.
"The peace of the Lord be with thee and with thy spirit!" said the cardinal, seating himself, and looking kindly at the king, whose grief and distress were marked in every feature of his fine face. "In the ante-chamber I have heard how poorly her majesty is, and Mademoiselle Brissac has just been imploring my prayers, poor child! But proceed, my learned doctor," he added, with a slight smile; while the deacon of the surgeons again perched his chin on the top of his cane, which was half hidden by his long white beard, and thus continued—
"Your majesty rails at the learned Paracelsus; I can afford to pardon that, when I remember me that to him we are indebted for introducing to the pharmacopœia, the mercurial, the antimonial, and ferruginous preparations which act so beneficially upon the organs of our system."
"But is not this Paracelsus, of whom thou boastest, an impure pantheist," asked the cardinal, "who, while believing in the existence of pure spirits which are without souls, receives aliment from minerals and fluids, and whose physiological theories are a wild mass of the most incoherent ideas, founded almost solely upon an application of the damnable mysteries of the cabala to the natural functions of the frame which God has given us?"
"I do not quite understand your eminence," replied John of the Silvermills, turning, with as much asperity as he dared, to the cardinal, whose towering figure and magnificent dress were imposing enough, without the memory of that important position held by him; "but I understand, and, with Paracelsus, believe (what certain malevolent commentators have denied) that the sun hath an influence upon the heart, as the moon hath upon the brain; that Jupiter acts upon the liver, as Saturn doth upon the spleen, Mercury on the lungs, Mars on the bile, and Venus on the kidneys and certain other organs. Hence the true apothegar should know the planets of the microcosm, their meridian, and their zodiac, before he attempteth to cure a disease. By due attention to them, he attains the discovery of the most hidden secrets of nature; for our human bodies are but a conglomeration of sulphur, of mercury, and of immaterial salt, which rendereth them peculiarly liable to planetary influences; and as each of these three elements may admit of another, we may, without knowing it, possess within us water that is dry, and fire that is cold."