This mountebank royalist mystic has no claim to be included among alchemical philosophers, and is only noticed here to advise students that everything relating to alchemy in the whole of his so-called works was impudently stolen from Philalethes. He practised wholesale piracy on his contemporaries and on ancient authors with equal effrontery. The account of his voyage to the land of the Rosicrucians is a mangled version of Bacon’s “Atlantis;” his apologues, epilogues, enigmas, &c., are also stolen goods; in short, whatever is of value in his books is matter borrowed from the highways and byways of occultism, and heaped indiscriminately together. Everything emanating from his own weakly intelligence is utterly contemptible; he was grossly superstitious and pitiably credulous, as may be seen by his medical recipes. He claimed a familiar acquaintance with the most arcane Rosicrucian mysteries, and pretended that he had visited the temples, holy houses, castles, and invisible mountains of the Fraternity. Of all the alchemical liars and of all mystical charlatans who have flourished in England since the first days of Anglo-occultism, John Heydon is chief. LASCARIS. German writers have principally occupied themselves with the transmutations of this singular personage, who so successfully shrouded himself in mystery, that his name, his age, his birthplace, and everything which concerns his private life are completely unknown. He called himself Lascaris, but also adopted other appellations. He claimed an Oriental origin, and as he spoke Greek fluently, he has passed for a descendant of the royal house of Lascaris. He represented himself as the archimandrite of a convent in the Island of Mytilena, and bore letters from the Greek patriarch of Constantinople. His mission in the West was the solicitation of alms for the ransom of Christian prisoners in the East. He appeared for the first time in Germany at the beginning of the eighteenth century, a man seemingly some forty or fifty years old, of attractive mien, agreeable in manner, and fluent in his conversation. Finding himself indisposed at Berlin, he sent for a certain apothecary, who for some reason was unable to attend, and on several occasions was represented by a pupil at the bedside of the stranger. With this youth Lascaris fell into conversation, and a sort of friendship sprung up between them. The apothecary’s pupil had studied Basil Valentine, and had attempted experiments on the principles of this adept. Lascaris recovered, and at the moment of departing from Berlin he took the youth aside, and presented him with a quantity of the transmuting powder, commanding him to be silent as to whence he had derived it, and while forbidding him to make use of it till some time after his departure, assured him that when Berlin unbelievers beheld its amazing effects, no one would be able to tax the alchemists with madness.