day encourage some worthy undertaker.

You take fair correct copies, well bound in calf's skin and lettered
at the back, of all modern bodies of arts and sciences whatsoever,
and in what language you please. These you distil in balneo Mariae,
infusing quintessence of poppy Q.S., together with three pints of
lethe, to be had from the apothecaries. You cleanse away carefully
the sordes and caput mortuum, letting all that is volatile
evaporate. You preserve only the first running, which is again to
be distilled seventeen times, till what remains will amount to about
two drams. This you keep in a glass vial hermetically sealed for
one-and-twenty days. Then you begin your catholic treatise, taking
every morning fasting (first shaking the vial) three drops of this
elixir, snuffing it strongly up your nose. It will dilate itself
about the brain (where there is any) in fourteen minutes, and you
immediately perceive in your head an infinite number of abstracts,
summaries, compendiums, extracts, collections, medullas, excerpta
quaedams, florilegias and the like, all disposed into great order
and reducible upon paper.

I must needs own it was by the assistance of this arcanum that I,
though otherwise impar, have adventured upon so daring an attempt,
never achieved or undertaken before but by a certain author called
Homer, in whom, though otherwise a person not without some
abilities, and for an ancient of a tolerable genius; I have
discovered many gross errors which are not to be forgiven his very
ashes, if by chance any of them are left. For whereas we are
assured he designed his work for a complete body of all knowledge,
human, divine, political, and mechanic {102a}, it is manifest he
hath wholly neglected some, and been very imperfect perfect in the