Page 25 - Charnock alchemical letter

abundance of golden jewels and plate, and some built chapels, cells,
colleges and hospitals, and some did enrich their poor kindred.

The Oxford Man

Why can you name me any English man who ever had this science
within this realm, at any time before or since the conquest?

Master Charnock

I could write a pretty book of them, what they were, where they wrought,
and how they came by it, which would be very long to tell.

The Oxford Man

Nay I pray you Thomas Charnock seeing we have gone thus far, let me
here, what some of them were.

Master Charnock

Then first I will begin with Albertus Magnus7 the black friar, and Roger
Bacon8 the gray friar, these two did confer together in Oxford many
years, and could not attain to it, by no kind of natural means or workings
because God was not so great with the one but the devil was as familiar
with the other. Then friar Bacon promised Albert his sworn brother that
he would have the philosophers’ stone, or else his magical science should
fail him. And then he made an invocation, with other ceremonies thereto
ascertaining by the which means he called an easy spirit named Delbora,
whom the magicians and witches do fain to be a lady of the white fairies,
causing her to come into his chamber between eleven and twelve in the
night and to bring with her the philosophers’ stone and to leave it upon
the table which was fair covered for that purpose with a napkin, and
thereupon a manchet and a fair cup of water, and there she left it and so
departed.

But when Bacon had obtained to this stone, by the art, yet was he never
the weary of his purpose, for he could not learn by no kind of speculation
nor it by practice, how to augment the same. Wherefore friar Bacon was
in a great melancholy fury, and swore a great oath to his Brother Albert,
that since he had obtained to the philosophers’ stone by such a mean
spirit he would make all the oaks in Oxfordshire to crack but that he
would have the knowledge which ways to augment the same. And so by

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