that regal court, daily took a draught of a very potent fluid from a golden flask, regularly prepared for and presented to her and them by the court chemist, who was no less a personage than the celebrated Rosicrucian Pietro di Lombardi, from whom subsequently the author known as "Le Petit Albert" boldly filched many of his celebrated mixtures for increasing strength, beauty, and virility, among the worn-out and blase courtiers near the throne. A copy of Le Petit Albert is on the shelf of my bookcase, and the very strange methods he directs, in order to produce given effects, are indeed not only curious, but the very poetry of pharmacy. Now, Peter of Lombardy was but another name of the famous chemist, La Bruyere, and is the same who subsequently, in the very next reign, lost his life by the explosion of a retort while pursuing his researches after the "Elixir of Life," one form of which he perfected and handed down to posterity under the name of the Egyptian God. Phymyllos, — the life-imparter, the strength-giver, the beneficent, the merciful, according to different renderings of the name by different scholars in subsequent days. Bulwer speaks of the same fluid, — a very near approach to the modern Protozone, — both in his "Haunted and the Haunters" and in the "Strange Story," also in "Zanoni," for the mystical liquid which Clarence Glyndon smelled of, and which gave him such strangely delightful life, love, and emotion was nothing more nor less than a highly concentrated form of the same element. It was also known to and made by the celebrated Asgill, the same great French medico who berated people for dying at less than one hundred years of age, and who openly boasted that he had the "Water of Life," half a gill a month of which, when taken, would prolong existence indefinitely. Indeed, there are many moderns who believe the same thing, but have different methods of its attainment. For instance, Lord Provost Chambers, writing from Mentone to Professor Simpson, says, "I do not need to remind you, Sir James, how many of our best citizens perish before they are sixty years of age through sheer hanging on too long to their professional avocations. They temporize by going annually out of town for a month or two, which no doubt carries them on, but the weight of business is still on their mind; and at length, through sundry entanglements, their day of safety is gone. A cold November finishes them, and about two o'clock on a wintry
