'What is Magnasia, good sire, I yow preye?' 'It is a water that is maad, I seye, Of elementés fourè,' quod Plato. 'Telle me the rootè, good sire,' quod he tho, Of that water, if it be yourè wille.' 'Nay, nay,' quod Plato, 'certein that I nylle; The philosophres sworn were everychoon That they sholden discovers it unto noon, Ne in no book it write in no manere, For unto Crist it is so lief and deere, That he wol nat that it discovered bee, But where it liketh to his deitee Man for tenspire, and eek for to deffende Whom that hym liketh; lo, this is the ende.' The belief in the possibility of alchemy seems to have been general sometime before Chaucer wrote; but that belief was accompanied by the conviction that alchemy was an impious pursuit, because the transmutation of baser metals into gold was regarded as trenching on the prerogative of the Creator, to whom alone this power rightfully belonged. In his _Inferno_ (which was probably written about the year 1300), Dante places the alchemists in the eighth circle of hell, not apparently because they were fraudulent impostors, but because, as one of them says, "I aped creative nature by my subtle art." In later times, some of those who pretended to have the secret and to perform great wonders by the use of it, became rich and celebrated, and were much sought after. The most distinguished of these pseudo-alchemists was he who passed under the name of Cagliostro. His life bears witness to the eagerness of human beings to be deceived. Joseph Balsamo was born in 1743 at Palermo, where his parents were tradespeople in a good way of business.[5] In the memoir of himself, which he wrote in prison, Balsamo seeks to surround his birth and parentage with mystery; he says, "I am ignorant, not only of my birthplace, but even of the parents who bore me.... My earliest infancy was passed in the town of Medina, in Arabia, where I was brought up under the name of Acharat." [5] The account of the life of Cagliostro is much condensed from Mr A.E. Waite's _Lives of the Alchemystical Philosophers_.