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"But could not you put it into English for him, Mr. Guy?" "I am afraid, Daniel, Rowland Dixon would not thank me for my pains. Besides, I could never make it sound half so noble in English as in those grand Latin verses, which fill the mouth, and the ears, and the mind-ay, and the heart and soul too. No, boy! schools are the proper places for representing such pieces; and, if I had but Latiners enough, we would have them ourselves. But there are not many houses, my good Daniel, in which learning is held in such esteem as it is at thy father's: if there were, I should have more Latin scholars; and, what is of far more consequence, the world would be wiser and better than it is!"

CHAPTER XXIV. P. I.

QUACK AND NO QUACK, BEING AN ACCOUNT OF DR. GREEN AND HIS MAN KEMP-POPULAR MEDICINE, HERBARY, THEORY OF SIGNATURES, WILLIAM DOVE, JOHN WESLEY, AND BAXTER.

Hold thy hand! health's dear maintainer;

Life perchance may burn the stronger:

Having substance to maintain her,
She untouched may last the longer.
When the artist goes about
To redress her flame, I doubt
Oftentimes he snuffs it out.

QUARLES.

It was not often that Rowland Dixon exhibited at Ingleton. He took his regular circuits to the fairs in all the surrounding country far and wide; but, in the intervals of his vocation, he who, when abroad, was the servant of the public, became his own master at home. His puppets were laid up in ordinary, the voice of Punch ceased, and the master of the motions enjoyed otium cum dignitate. When he favoured his friends and neighbours with an exhibition, it was speciali gratia, and in a way that rather enhanced that dignity than derogated from it.

A performer of a very different kind used in those days to visit Ingleton, in his rounds, where his arrival was always expected by some of the community with great anxiety. This was a certain Dr. Green, who, having been regularly educated for the profession of medicine, and regularly graduated in it, chose to practise as an itinerant, and take the field with a merry-andrew for his aid-de-camp. He was of a respectable and wealthy family in the neighbourhood of Doncaster, which neighbourhood, on their account, he never approached in his professional circuits; though for himself he

was far from being ashamed of the character that he had assumed. The course which he had taken had been deliberately chosen, with the twofold object of gratifying his own humour and making a fortune; and in the remoter, as well as in the immediate purpose, he succeeded to his heart's content.

It is not often that so much worldly prudence is found connected with so much eccentricity of character. A French poetess, Madame de Villedieu, taking as a text for some verses the liberal maxim Que la vertu dépend autant du temperament que des loix, says―

"Presque toujours chacun suit son caprice;
Heureux est le mortel que les destins amis
Ont partagé d'un caprice permis."

He is indeed a fortunate man who, if he must have a hobbyhorse-which is the same as saying if he will have onekeeps it not merely for pleasure, but for use, breaks it in well, has it entirely under command, and gets as much work out of it as he could have done out of a common roadster. Dr. Green did this: he had not taken to this strange course because he was impatient of the restraints of society, but because he fancied that his constitution, both of body and of mind, required an erratic life, and that, within certain bounds which he prescribed for himself, he might indulge in it, both to his own advantage, and that of the community; that part of the community, at least, among whom it would be his lot to labour. Our laws had provided itinerant courts of justice for the people. Our church had formerly provided itinerant preachers; and after the Reformation, when the mendicant orders were abolished, by whom this service used to be performed, such preachers have never failed to appear during the prevalence of any religious influenza. Dr. Green thought that itinerant physicians were wanted; and that, if practitioners regularly educated and well qualified would condescend to such a course, the poor ignorant people would no longer be cheated by travelling quacks, and sometimes poisoned by them!

One of the most reprehensible arts to which the reformers resorted in their hatred of popery, was that of adapting vulgar verses to church tunes, and thus associating, with ludicrous images, or with something worse, melodies which had formerly been held sacred. It is related of Whitefield, that he, making a better use of the same device, fitted hymns to certain popular airs, because, he said, "there was no reason why the devil should keep all the good tunes to himself." Green acted upon a similar principle when he took the field as a physician errant, with his man Kemp, like another Sancho, for his squire. But the doctor was no Quixote;

and his merry-andrew had all Sancho's shrewdness, without any alloy of his simpleness..

In those times medical knowledge among the lower practitioners was at the lowest point. Except in large towns the people usually trusted to domestic medicine, which some Lady Bountiful administered from her family receipt book; or to a village doctress, whose prescriptions were as likely sometimes to be dangerously active as at others to be ridiculous and inert. But while they held to their garden physic, it was seldom that any injury was done, either by exhibiting wrong medicines or violent ones.

Herbs, woods, and springs, the power that in you lies,
If mortal man could know your properties!*

There was at one time abundant faith in those properties. The holy shepherdess in Fletcher's fine pastoral drama, which so infinitely surpasses all foreign compositions of that class, thus apostrophizes the herbs which she goes out to cull:

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"Oh you best sons of earth,

You only brood unto whose happy birth
Virtue was given, holding more of nature
Than man, her firstborn and most perfect creature,
Let me adore you, you that only can

Help or kill nature, drawing out that span

Of life and breath even to the end of time!"

So abundantly was the English garden stocked in the age of the Tudors, that Tusser, after enumerating in an appendix to one of his chapters two-and-forty herbs for the kitchen, fourteen others for sallads or sauces, eleven to boil or butter, seventeen as strewing herbs, and forty "herbs, branches, and flowers for windows and pots," adds a list of seventeen herbs "to still in summer," and of five-and-twenty "necessary herbs to grow in the garden for physic, not rehearsed before;" and after all advises his readers to seek more in the field. He says

"The nature of flowers Dame Physic doth shew;
She teacheth them all to be known to a few."

Elsewhere he observes that

"The knowledge of stilling is one pretty feat,
The waters be wholesome, the charges not great."

In a comedy of Lord Digby's, written more than a hundred years after Tusser's didactics, one of the scenes is laid in a lady's laboratory, "with a fountain in it, some stills, and many shelves, with pots of porcelain and glasses;" and when

* Fletcher.

the lady wishes to keep her attendant out of the way, she sends her there, saying

"I have a task to give you-carefully

To shift the oils in the perfuming room,
As in the several ranges you shall see
The old begin to wither. To do it well
Will take you up some hours, but 'tis a work
I oft perform myself."

And Tusser, among "the points of housewifery united to the comfort of husbandry," includes good housewifely physic, as inculcated in these rhymes:

"Good housewife provides ere an sickness do come,
Of sundry good things in her house to have some;
Good aqua composita, and vinegar tart,

Rose water, and treacle to comfort the heart;
Cold herbs in her garden for agues that burn,
That overstrong heat to good temper may turn ;
White endive, and succory, with spinage enow,

All such with good pot herbs should follow the plough.
Get water of fumitory liver to cool,

And others the like, or else go like a fool;
Conserves of barberry, quinces and such,

With syrups that easeth the sickly so much."

Old Gervase Markham, in his "approved book called the English Housewife, containing the inward and outward virtues which ought to be in a complete woman," places her skill in physic as one of the most principal; “you shall understand," he says, "that sith the preservation and care of the family touching their health and soundness of body consisteth most in her diligence, it is meet that she have a physical kind of knowledge, how to administer any wholesome receipts or medicines for the good of their healths, as well to prevent the first occasion of sickness, as to take away the effects and evil of the same, when it hath made seizure upon the body." And "as it must be confessed that the depths and secrets of this most excellent art of physic are far beyond the capacity of the most skilful woman," he relates for the housewife's use some 66 approved medicines and old doctrines, gathered together by two excellent and famous physicians, and in a manuscript given to a great worthy countess of this land.”

The receipts collected in this and other books for domestic practice are some of them so hypercomposite that even Tusser's garden could hardly supply all the indigenous ingredients; others are of the most fantastic kind, and for the most part they were as troublesome in preparation, and many of them as disgusting, as they were futile. That "sovereign water" which was invented by Dr. Stephens was composed of almost all known spices, and all savoury and odorous herbs, distilled

in Claret. With this Dr. Stephens "preserved his own life until such extreme old age that he could neither go nor ride; and he did continue his life, being bedrid five years, when other physicians did judge he could not live one year; and he confessed a little before his death, that if he were sick at any time, he never used anything but this water only. And also the Archbishop of Canterbury used it, and found such goodness in it that he lived till he was not able to drink out of a cup, but sucked his drink through a hollow pipe of silver."

Twenty-nine plants were used in the composition of Dr. Adrian Gilbert's most sovereign cordial water, besides hartshorn, figs, raisins, gillyflowers, cowslips, marygolds, blue violets, red rose buds, ambergris, bezoar stone, sugar, aniseed, liquorice, and to crown all, "what else you please." But then it was sovereign against all fevers; and one who in time of plague should take two spoonfuls of it in good beer, or white wine," he might walk safely from danger, by the leave of God." The water of life was distilled from nearly as many ingredients, to which were added a fleshy running capon, the loins and legs of an old coney, the red flesh of the sinews of a leg of mutton, four young chickens, twelve larks, the yelks of twelve eggs, and a loaf of white bread, all to be distilled in white wine.

For consumption there were pills in which powder of pearls, of white amber and of coral, were the potential ingredients; there was cock water, the cock being to be chased and beaten before he was killed, or else plucked alive! and there was a special water procured by distillation, from a peck of garden shell snails and a quart of earth worms, besides other things; this was prescribed, not for consumption alone, but for dropsy and all obstructions. For all faintness, hot agues, heavy fantasies, and imaginations, a cordial was prepared in tabulates, which were called Manus Christi: the true receipt required one ounce of prepared pearls to twelve of fine sugar, boiled with rose water, violet water, cinnamon water, "or howsoever one would have them." But apothecaries seldom used more than a drachm of pearls to a pound of sugar, because men would not go to the cost thereof; and the Manus Christis simplex was made without any pearl at all. For broken bones, bones out of joint, or any grief in the bones or sinews, oil of swallows was pronounced exceedingly sovereign, and this was to be procured by pounding twenty live swallows in a mortar with about as many different herbs! A mole, male or female according to the sex of the patient, was to be dried in an oven whole as taken out of the earth, and administered in powder for the falling evil. A gray eel with a white belly was to be closed in an earthen pot, and buried alive in a dunghill, and at the end of a fortnight its oil might be collected to "help hearing." A mix

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