Paracelsus. 
189 
1883.] 
of all the ancients was worthy to fasten his shoe-latchets. 
“ You shall follow me,” he cried, — “ you, Avicenna, Galen, 
Rhasis ; you gentlemen of Paris, Cologne, Vienna, and 
whomsoever the Rhine and Danube nourish, — you who in- 
habit the isles of the sea, — you likewise Dalmatians, Athe- 
nians, thou Arab, thou Greek, thou Jew, — all shall follow 
me, and the monarchy shall be mine.” Even in an age 
which allowed far greater exaltation of self and depreciation 
of others than would now be considered permissible, this 
rhodomontade was sufficiently remarkable to confer a new 
meaning upon one of his names — Bombast. In opposition 
to the usual practice, his lectures were delivered in German 
(possibly because he was a poor Latin scholar), and were at 
first largely attended by all classes. But if his Latin would 
have been darkness that might be felt, his German was, to 
its auditors at least, little better than darkness visible. 
Hitherto he had confined his intemperance to language, and 
had lived chiefly on bread and water ; but about this time 
he fell from ascetic purity to the grossest besottedness, and 
it is even said that his lectures owed all their fire and force 
to deep potations, and that he never came sober to the bed- 
side of a patient. These habits naturally tended to increase 
the normal obscurity of his language and to repel his hearers, 
who fell off one by one — some, perhaps, having seized the 
cardinal points of his system, which, when clothed in clearer 
words, might pass as original ; some, thinking that they had 
now spied out the nakedness of this intellectual Canaan ; 
and the greater number, doubtless, from sheer weariness or 
disgust. At last matters were brought to a crisis by a 
quarrel between the professor and a canon of the church 
named Cornelius Lichtenfels, who had promised, in the 
agonies of gout, to pay a thousand florins for a cure. The 
cure was effected, but the florins withheld. Paracelsus 
brought an aCtion at law for the recovery of his fee, but the 
case was decided against him. He flew into a violent rage, 
and applied such opprobrious epithets to his ungrateful 
patient, and to the magistrate who had pronounced the ad- 
verse decision, that the town council took the matter up, 
and dismissed the professor from his chair. He now resumed 
his errant career, sinking deeper and deeper into debauchery, 
now saving, now destroying life, by the administration of 
his potent medicaments. After wandering about in Alsatia, 
North Germany, Switzerland, and Austria, he was at length 
seized with a fatal illness in a tavern at Salzburg, and died 
in the Hospital of St. Sebastian, September 24th, 1541. 
Such was the outer life of this extraordinary man, whose 
