Читать книгу Character Writings of the Seventeenth Century - Various - Страница 77

Table of Contents

Is a mountebank of a larger bill than a tailor: if he can but come by names enough of diseases to stuff it with, 'tis all the skill he studies for. He took his first beginning from a cunning woman, and stole this black art from her, while he made her sea-coal fire. All the diseases ever sin brought upon man doth he pretend to be a curer of, when the truth is, his main cunning is corn-cutting. A great plague makes him, what with railing against such as leave their cures for fear of infection, and in friendly breaking cake-bread with the fishwives at funerals. He utters a most abominable deal of carduus water, and the conduits cry out, All the learned doctors may cast their caps at him. He parts stakes witn some apothecary in the suburbs, at whose house he lies; and though he be never so familiar with his wife, the apothecary dares not (for the richest horn in his shop) displease him. All the midwives in the town are his intelligencers; but nurses and young merchants' wives that would fain conceive with child, these are his idolaters. He is a more unjust bone-setter than a dice-maker. He hath put out more eyes than the small-pox; more deaf than the cataracts of Nilus; lamed more than the gout; shrunk more sinews than one that makes bowstrings, and killed more idly than tobacco. A magistrate that had any-way so noble a spirit as but to love a good horse well, would not suffer him to be a farrier. His discourse is vomit, and his ignorance the strongest purgation in the world. To one that would be speedily cured, he hath more delays and doubles than a hare or a lawsuit. He seeks to set us at variance with nature, and rather than he shall want diseases, he'll beget them. His especial practice (as I said before) is upon women; labours to make their minds sick, ere their bodies feel it, and then there's work for the dog-leech. He pretends the cure of madmen; and sure he gets most by them, for no man in his perfect wit would meddle with him. Lastly, he is such a juggler with urinals, so dangerously unskilful, that if ever the city will have recourse to him for diseases that need purgation, let them employ him in scouring Moorditch.