Some medical enthusiasts held that a bird of such singular and noble properties must be of sovereign virtue for the ills of mankind, and did not hesitate to assign its several healing properties. On these mistaken individuals Browne descends heavily. “Surely,” quoth he, “they were not wel-wishers unto Physick or remedies easily acquired, who derived Medicines from the Phœnix, as some have done. It is a folly to finde out remedies that are not recoverable under a thousand years, or propose the prolonging of life by that which the twentieth generation may never behold. More veniable is a dependence upon the Philosopher’s stone, potable gold, or any of those Arcanas whereby Paracelsus, that died himself at fourty seven, gloried that he could make men immortall, which, although exceedingly difficult, yet they are not impossible: nor doe they (rightly understood) impose any violence on Nature. And, therefore, if strictly taken for the Phœnix, very strange is that which is delivered by Plutarch, that the brain thereof is a pleasant morsel, but that it causeth the headach.” The amount of headache caused by too free an indulgence in Phœnix must have been infinitesimal. The Phœnix may still be considered to have a literary existence, and remains part of the stock-in-trade of the orator and poet as an emblem of something especially choice and rare. Fletcher writes of “That lone bird in fruitful Arabie, When now her strength and waning life decays, Upon some airy rock or mountain high, In spicy bed (fir’d by near Phœbus’ rays) Herself and all her crooked age consumes: Straight from her ashes, and those rich perfumes, A newborn Phœnix flies, and widow’d place resumes.” Ariosto, in his “Orlando Furioso,” refers to the bird in the Voyage of Astolfo in the following lines:— “Arabia, nam’d the happy, now he gains, Incense and myrrh perfume her grateful plains: The Virgin Phœnix there in search of rest Selects from all the world her balmy nest.” In the two foregoing extracts the Phœnix has been represented as maiden and as widow, and in the first line of Ariosto the pronoun is masculine, and in the fourth line feminine. Ovid, and many other writers, in describing him, her, or it, select the masculine as the most appropriate. Thus Ovid, in the translation of Dryden, sings:— “All these receive their birth from other things, But from himself the Phœnix only springs: Self-born, begotten by the parent flame In which he burn’d, another and the same.” It is needless to give the rest of the reference, as the ancient poet naturally follows in the lines of the recognized tradition: the funeral pyre, the infant Phœnix rising from the ashes, the dutiful removal of the paternal remains to Heliopolis, all taking their proper and accustomed place in the narrative.