Therefore, I intreat you, sir, spare to use my name, & let my
letters I send either be safely kept or burned that I write about it, for
indeed, sir, I am more than before sensible of the evil effects that will
arise by the publishing of it. I should never be at quiet, neither at
home nor abroad, for one or other that would be enquiring & seeking after
knowledge thereof, that I should be tired out & forced to leave the
place: nay, it would be blazed abroad into Europe." How much more comic
is nature than any comedy! _Mutato nomine de te_. Take heart, ambitious
youth, the sun and moon will be no more disconcerted by any effort of
yours than by the pots and pans of Jonathan Brewster. It is a curious
proof of the duality so common (yet so often overlooked) in human
character, that Brewster was all this while manager of the Plymouth
trading-post, near what is now New London. The only professors of the
transmutation of metals who still impose on mankind are to be found in
what is styled the critical department of literature. Their _materia
prima_, or universal solvent, serves equally for the lead of Tupper or
the brass of Swinburne.
In a letter of Sir Kenelm Digby to J. Winthrop, Jr., we find some odd
prescriptions. "For all sorts of agues, I have of late tried the
following magnetical experiment with infallible success.
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