"With what judgment ye judge it shall be judged to you again" is the verdict of three centuries on Paracelsus. In return for unmeasured abuse of his predecessors and contemporaries he has been held up to obloquy as the arch-charlatan of history. We have taken a cheap estimate of him from Fuller and Bacon, and from a host of scurrilous scribblers who debased or perverted his writings. Fuller(4) picked him out as exemplifying the drunken quack, whose body was a sea wherein the tide of drunkenness was ever ebbing and flowing--"He boasted that shortly he would order Luther and the Pope, as well as he had done Galen and Hippocrates. He was never seen to pray, and seldome came to Church. He was not onely skilled in naturall Magick (the utmost bounds whereof border on the suburbs of hell) but is charged to converse constantly with familiars. Guilty he was of all vices but wantonnesse: . . . " (4) Fuller: The Holy and Profane State, Cambridge, 1642, p. 56. Francis Bacon, too, says many hard things of him.(5) (5) Bacon: Of the Proficience and Advancement of Learning, Bk. II, Pickering ed., London, 1840, p. 181. Works, Spedding ed., III, 381. To the mystics, on the other hand, he is Paracelsus the Great, the divine, the most supreme of the Christian magi, whose writings are too precious for science, the monarch of secrets, who has discovered the Universal Medicine. This is illustrated in Browning's well-known poem "Paracelsus," published when he was only twenty-one; than which there is no more pleasant picture in literature of the man and of his aspirations. His was a "searching and impetuous soul" that sought to win from nature some startling secret--". . . a tincture of force to flush old age with youth, or breed gold, or imprison moonbeams till they change to opal shafts!" At the same time with that capacity for self-deception which characterizes the true mystic he sought to cast Light on a darkling race; save for that doubt, I stood at first where all aspire at last To stand: the secret of the world was mine. I knew, I felt (perception unexpressed, Uncomprehended by our narrow thought, But somehow felt and known in every shift And change in the spirit,--nay, in every pore Of the body, even)--what God is, what we are, What life is--. . .(6) (6) Robert Browning: Paracelsus, closing speech.