whom of course he was introduced, liked him very much.*

* A minor result of the intimacy was that Mr. Browning
became member, in 1835, of the Institut Historique, and in
1836 of the Societe Francaise de Statistique Universelle, to
both of which learned bodies his friend belonged.

Mr. Browning did treat Paracelsus in his own way; and in so doing
produced a character--at all events a history--which, according
to recent judgments, approached far nearer to the reality than any
conception which had until then been formed of it. He had carefully
collected all the known facts of the great discoverer's life, and
interpreted them with a sympathy which was no less an intuition of their
truth than a reflection of his own genius upon them. We are enabled
in some measure to judge of this by a paper entitled 'Paracelsus, the
Reformer of Medicine', written by Dr. Edward Berdoe for the Browning
Society, and read at its October meeting in 1888; and in the difficulty
which exists for most of us of verifying the historical data of
Mr. Browning's poem, it becomes a valuable guide to, as well as an
interesting comment upon it.

Dr. Berdoe reminds us that we cannot understand the real Paracelsus
without reference to the occult sciences so largely cultivated in his
day, as also to the mental atmosphere which produced them; and he quotes
in illustration a passage from the writings of that Bishop of Spanheim
who was the instructor of Paracelsus, and who appears as such in the
poem. The passage is a definition of divine magic, which is apparently
another term for alchemy; and lays down the great doctrine of all
mediaeval occultism, as of all modern theosophy--of a soul-power equally
operative in the material and the immaterial, in nature and in the