WILLI A AI LEE. 151 



ttie name alchemy, or the art of transmuting metals, of which 

 he has left many treatises, some published and some still 

 remainmg in MS., which, whatever they may be thought ol 

 now, contain a multitude of curious and useful passages inde- 

 pendently of their principal subject. The third discovery in 

 chemistry, not so deserving of the reader's 3,ttention, was the 

 tincture of gold for the prolongation of life, of which, Dr. 

 Friend says, he has given hints in his writings, and has said 

 enough to show that he was no pretender to this art, but 

 understood as much of it as " any of his successors." 



As to the vulgar imputation on his character of his leaning 

 to magic, it was utterly unfounded, and the .ridiculous story of 

 his making a brazen head, which spoke and answered questions, 

 is a calumny indirectly fathered upon him, having been origin- 

 ally imputed to Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln. That 

 he had too high an opinion of judicial astrology, and some other 

 arts of that nature, was not so properly an error of his as of the 

 age in which he lived ; and considering how few errors, among 

 the many which infected that age, appear in his writings, it may 

 be easily forgiven. 



WILLIAM LEE. 



There is a singular confusion pervading the early history of 

 the stocking-frame : persons, places, and dates are all jumbled 

 up together in the accounts given of the inventor and the 

 invention, and these accounts it is difficult to reconcile, unless 

 we implicitly believe the evidence of a painting which long 

 adorned the Stocking-weavers' Hall in Redcross Street, London. 

 This portrait represented a man in collegiate costume, in the 

 act of pointing to an iron stocking-frame, and addressing a 

 woman wlio is knitting with needles by hand. The picture 



