with any fertility of fancy, are IDLENESS, AVARICE, MICHERIE or Thieving, and NEGLIGENCE, the secretary of SLOTH". Instead of boldly cloathing these qualities with corporeal attributes, aptly and poetically imagined, he coldly yet sensibly describes their operations, and enumerates their properties. What Gower wanted in invention, he supplied from his common-place book; which appears to have been stored with an inexhaustible fund of instructive maxims, pleasant narrations, and philosophical definitions. It seems to have been his object to crowd all his erudition into this elaborate performance. Yet there is often some degree of contrivance and art in his manner of introducing and adapting subjects of a very distant nature, and which are totally foreign to his general design. In the fourth book our confessor turns chemist; and discoursing at large on the Hermetic science, developes its principles, and exposes its abuses, with great penetration'. He delivers the doctrines concerning the vegetable, mineral, and animal stones, to which Falstaffe alludes in Shakespeare, h Lib. iv. f. 62. a. col. 1. Lib. v. f. 94. a. col. 1. Lib. iv. f. 68. a. col. 1. Lib. v. f. 119. a. col. 2. i Lib. iv. f. 76. b. col. 2. * Falstaffe mentions a philosopher's or chemist's two stones. See P. Henr. IV. Act iii. Sc. 2. Our author abundantly confirms Doctor Warburton's explication of this passage, which the rest of the commentators do not seem to have understood. See Ashm. Theatr. Chemic. p. 484. edit. Lond. 1652. 4to. [The nations bordering upon the Jews, attributed the miraculous events of that people, to those external means and material instruments, such as symbols, ceremonies, and other visible signs or circumstances, which by God's special appointment, under their mysterious dispensation, they were directed to use. Among the observations which the oriental Gentiles made on the history of the Jews, they found that the Divine will was to be known by certain appearances in pretious stones. The Magi of the East, believing that the preternatural discoveries obtained by means of the Urim and Thummim, a contexture of gems in the breast-plate of the Mosaic priests, were owing to some virtue inherent in those stones, adopted the knowledge of the occult properties of gems as a branch of their magical system. Hence it became the peculiar profession of one class of their Sages, to investigate and interpret the various shades and coruscations, and to explain, to a moral purpose, the different colours, the dews, clouds, and imageries, which gems, differently exposed to the sun, moon, stars, fire, or air, at particular seasons, and inspected by persons particularly qualified, were seen to exhibit. This notion being once established, a thousand extravagancies arose, of healing diseases, of procuring victory, and of seeing future events, by means of pretious stones and other lucid substances. See Plin. Nat. Hist. xxxvii. 9. 10. These superstitions were soon ingrafted into the Arabian philosophy, from which they were propagated all over Europe, and continued to ope with amazing accuracy and perspicuity'; although this doctrine was adopted from systems then in vogue, as we shall see below. In another place he applies the Argonautic expedition in search of the golden fleece, which he relates at length, to the same visionary philosophy". Gower very probably conducted his associate Chaucer into these profound mysteries, which had been just opened to our countrymen by the books of Roger Bacon ". In the seventh book, the whole circle of the Aristotelic philosophy is explained; which our lover is desirous to learn, supposing that the importance and variety of its speculations might conduce to sooth his anxieties by diverting and engaging his attention. Such a discussion was not very likely to afford him much consolation: especially, as hardly a single ornamental digression is admitted, to decorate a field naturally so destitute of flowers. Almost the only one is the following description of the chariot and crown of the sun; in which the Arabian ideas concerning precious stones are interwoven with Ovid's fictions and the classical mythology. Of golde glistrende°, spoke and whele, rate even so late as the visionary experi- establishments. See Martin's West. Isles, 167. 225. And Aubrey's MISCELL. 128. Lond. 8vo.- -ADDITIONS.] p. p. 1 Ibid. f. 77. a. col. 1. m Lib. v. f. 101. a. seq. "See supra, p. 260, Ñote 1. P chariot. 4 before. I When king Richard the First, in 1191, took the Isle of Cyprus, he is said to have found the castles filled with rich furniture of gold and silver, "necnon lapidibus pretiosis, et plurimam virtutem habentibus." G. Vines. ITER HIEROSOL. cap. xli. p. 328. Hist. Anglic. SCRIPT. vol. ii. Oxon. 1687. Set in the front of his corone, In his corone; and also byhynde, And Vandides, and Jacinctus. Whereof it shineth wel the bety. Sit, with his diademe on heade, The Sonne, shinende in his carte: And for to lead him swithe and smarte, After the bright daiès lawe, There ben ordained for to drawe Four hors his chare, and him withall, Whereoff the names tell I shall : Eritheus the first is hote", The whiche is redde, and shineth hote; Lampes the third courser hight, And Philogeus is the ferth", And gone so swift upon the heven, &c.c Our author closes this course of the Aristotelic philosophy with a system of politics: not taken from Aristotle's genuine treatise on that subject, but from the first chapter of a spurious compilation entitled, SECRETUM SECRETORUM ARISTOTELIS, addressed under the name of Aristotle to his pupil Alexander the Great, and printed at Bononia in the year 1516. A work, treated as genuine, and explained with a learned gloss, by Roger Bacon and of the highest reputation in Gower's age, as it was transcribed, and illustrated with a commentary, for the use of king Edward the Third, by his chaplain Walter de Millemete, prebendary of the collegiate church of Glaseney in Cornwall. Under this head, our author takes an opportunity of giving advice to a weak yet amiable prince, his patron king Richard the Second, on a subject of the most difficult and delicate nature, with much freedom and dignity. It might also be proved, that Gower, through this detail of the sciences, copied in many other articles the SECRETUM SECRETORUM; which is a sort of an abridgement of the Aristotelic philosophy, filled with many Arabian innovations and absurdities, and enriched with an appendix concerning the choice of wines, phlebotomy, justice, public notaries, tournaments, and physiognomy, rather than from the Latin translations of Aristotle. It is evident, that he copied from this work the doctrine of the three chemical stones, mentioned above". That part of our author's astronomy, in which he speaks of the magician Nectabanus instructing Alexander the Great, when a youth, in the knowledge of the fifteen stars, and their respective plants and precious stones, appropriated to the operations of natural magic1, seems to be borrowed from Callisthenes, the fabulous writer of the life of Alexander. Yet many wonderful inventions, which occur in this romance of Alexander, are also to be found in the SECRETUM SECRETORUM: particularly the fiction of Alexander's Stentorian horn, mentioned above, which was heard at the distance of sixty miles', and of which Kircher has given a curious representation in his PHONURGIA, copied from an antient picture of this gigantic instrument, belonging to a manuscript of the SECRETUM SECRETORUM, preserved in the Vatican libraryTM. It is pretended by the mystic writers, that Aristotle in his old age reviewed his books, and digested his philosophy into one system or body, which he sent, in the form of an epistle, to Alexander. This is the supposititious tract of which I have been speaking; and it is thus described by Lydgate, who has translated a part of it. Title of this boke LAPIS PHILOSOPHORUM, There is an Epistle under the name of Alexander the Great, De Lapide Philosophorum, among the SCRIPTORES CHEMICI artis auriferæ, Basil. 1593. tom. i. And edit. 1610. See below, Note *. I have mentioned a Latin romance of Alexander's life, as printed by Frederick Corsellis, about 1468. sup. vol. i. p. 135. On examination, that impression is said to be finished December 17, 1468. Unluckily, the seventeenth day of December was a Sunday that year. A manifest proof that the name of Corsellis was forged. [The 17th December, 1468, was a Saturday.-RITSON.] i Lib. vii. f. 148, a. seq. Or from fictitious books attributed to Alexander the Great, De septem Herbis septem Planetarum, &c. See Fabric. Bibl. Gr. tom. ii. p. 206. See supra, vol. i. p. 133. And vol. ii. p. 56. Note f. Callisthenes is mentioned twice in this poem, Lib. vii. f. 139. b. col. 2; and vi. f. 139. b. col. 2. See a chapter of Callisthenes and Alexander, in Lydgate's FALL OF PRINCES, B. iv. ch. 1. seq. fol. 99. edit. ut infr. m 1 See supra, vol. i. p. 136. |