Of Antimony Vulgar The Second Treatise

" My honourable Patron and my good Friend, my humble service in the first place presented to you: At you earnest request I cannot but accomplish your desires, seeing you have a great love and affection, by experience to find out the Secrets of Nature, which at this time are known to few, and even wholly hid in darkness. Although many of the Ancients have written thereof, and their books dispersed, yet are they wri¿en in a Magick stile, and profitable to none but those who from their youth have been trained up in this Magick, or instructed by God in such Secrets. Therefore, these Secrets for which you humble yourself are in a deep pit, strongly locked up, so that no man can open unless he have received the Key from the Spirit of Truth. Of the Magical Antimony or of that Antimony of the Ancients will I speak no thing in this treatise, seeing that men will know nothing of it; but what they read of it they apply only to common Antimony; of the which you only desire a treatise which I will freely communicate to you and will write, What it is, Of what parts it is composed, Into what it may be resolved again. And you shall in this treatise understand me no otherwise then according to the Letter; for I will use here no Metaphors, Allegories, or Similitudes; only I will describe Antimony with a plain stile, that you may not be deceived, though you prepare it according to the Letter, and ye shall obtain that of which I write; by these, you may also judge whether in common Antimony that secret, or Chymical and Physical Mystery be or not, of the which Paracelsus and the Magicians have written..."