Part 2

Doctor Hill, a notorious wit, physician, and man of letters, having quarrelled with the members of the Royal Society, who had refused to admit him as an associate, resolved to avenge himself. At the time that Bishop Berkeley had issued his work on the marvellous virtues of tar-water, Hill addressed to their secretary a letter, purporting to be from a country surgeon, and reciting the particulars of a cure which he had effected. "A sailor," he wrote, "broke his leg, and applied to me for help. I bound together the broken portions, and washed them with the celebrated tar-water. Almost immediately the sailor felt the beneficial effects of this remedy, and it was not long before his leg was completely healed!" The letter was read and discussed at the meetings of the Royal Society, and caused considerable difference of opinion. Papers were written for and against the tar-water and the restored leg, when a second letter arrived from the (pretended) country practitioner: "In my last I omitted to mention that the broken limb of the sailor was a wooden leg!"

THE CURATE AND THE DUKE.

The Duke of Grafton, when hunting, was thrown into a ditch; at the same time a young curate, calling out, "Lie still, your Grace," leaped over him, and pursued his sport. On being assisted to remount by his attendants, the duke said, "That young man shall have the first good living that falls to my disposal; had he stopped to have taken care of me, I never would have patronised him"--being delighted with an ardour similar to his own, and with a spirit that would not stoop to flatter.

A LOYAL AND FATAL PRAYER.

It is related by Thoresby that Mr. John Jackson, a good old Puritan, and a member of the Assembly of Divines at Westminster, "was yet so zealously affected for King Charles I., when he heard of his being brought before a pretended high court of justice, that he prayed earnestly that God would please to prevent that horrid act, which would be a perpetual shame to the nation, and a reproach to the Protestant religion; or, at least, would be pleased to remove him, that he might not see the woful day. His prayer was heard and answered as to himself, for he was buried the week before" the execution of Charles took place.

FLAVEL'S "DAY OF HEAVEN."

This distinguished Nonconformist divine, who lived about the end of the seventeenth century, in his _Treatise on the Soul of Man_ relates of himself--so at least it is understood, though he speaks in the third person--that for a day he was wrapt in such intimate spiritual communion with heaven, as exhausted the powers of physical nature, and for a time appeared to leave him on the brink of the grave. This singular season of trance he used to style "one of the days of heaven;" and he affirmed, that in that time there came to him more insight into the heavenly life, than he had all his days gained from books or sermons.

"Being on a journey, he set himself to improve his time by meditation; when his mind grew intent, till at length he had such ravishing tastes of heavenly joys, and such full assurance of his interest therein, that he utterly lost the sight and sense of this world and all its concerns, so that for hours he knew not where he was. At last, perceiving himself faint through a great loss of blood from his nose, he alighted from his horse, and sat down at a spring, where he washed and refreshed himself, earnestly desiring, if it were the will of God, that he might then leave the world. His spirits reviving, he finished his journey in the same delightful frame. He passed all that night without a wink of sleep, the joy of the Lord still overflowing him, so that he seemed an inhabitant of the other world." It was taken by his religious friends as a special promise of heavenly favour, that at the birth of Flavel a pair of nightingales made their nest close to the chamber of his mother, and welcomed him into the world with their delightful warble.

A ROYAL MEDICINE.

Even so late as the days of Queen Elizabeth, ignorance and superstition continued prime regulating powers in the practice of physic; accomplished as some of the physicians of the day were, it was, as Lord Bacon has affirmed, in every department excepting those that immediately touched their own profession. Sir William Bulleyn was not one of the least prominent and enlightened; but some of the prescriptions which he has left on record, attest a very deplorable state of things, existing little more than half a century before Harvey achieved his great discovery. Take for example this recipe for an

"_Electuarium de Gemmis._"

"Take two drachms of white perles; two little peeces of saphyre; jacinth, corneline, emerauldes, granettes, of each an ounce; setwal, the sweate roote doronike, the rind of pomecitron, mace, basel seede, of each two drachms; of redde corall, amber, shaving of ivory, of each two drachms; rootes both of white and red behen, ginger, long peper, spicknard, folium indicum, saffron, cardamon, of each one drachm; of troch. diarodon, lignum aloes, of each half a small handful; cinnamon, galinga, zurubeth, which is a kind of setwal, of each one drachm and a half; thin pieces of gold and sylver, of each half a scruple; of musk, half a drachm. Make your electuary with honey emblici, which is the fourth kind of mirobalans with roses, strained in equall partes, as much as will suffice. This healeth cold diseases of ye braine, harte, stomack. It is a medicine proved against the tremblynge of the harte, faynting and souning, the weaknes of the stomacke, pensivenes, solitarines. Kings and noble men have used this for their comfort. It causeth them to be bold-spirited, the body to smell wel, and ingendreth to the face good coloure."

A SIGNIFICANT INTERPOLATION.

The most celebrated wits and _bon vivants_ of the day graced the dinner table of Dr. Kitchener, and _inter aliis_ George Colman, who was an especial favourite. His interpolation of a little monosyllable in a written admonition, which the Doctor caused to be placed on the mantlepiece of the dining parlour, will never be forgotten, and was the origin of such a drinking bout as was seldom permitted under his roof. The caution ran thus: "Come at seven, go at eleven." Colman briefly altered the sense of it; for, upon the Doctor's attention being directed to the card, he read, to his astonishment, "Come at seven, _go it_ at eleven!" which the guests did, and the claret was punished accordingly.

THE SEAMAN-BISHOP.

Dr. Lyons, who was appointed to the Bishopric of Cork, Cloyne, and Ross, towards the end of the reign of Queen Elizabeth, held the See for twenty years, but only preached once--on the death of the Queen. His aversion to preaching is ascribed to the fact that he was not educated for the church. He was, indeed, captain of a ship, and distinguished himself so gallantly in several actions with the Spaniards, that, on his being introduced to the Queen, she told him that he should have the first vacancy that offered. The simple captain understood the Queen literally; and soon after, hearing of a vacancy in the See of Cork, he immediately set out for Court, and claimed the fulfilment of the royal promise. The Queen, astonished at the request, for a time remonstrated against the impropriety of it, and said that she could never think it a suitable office for him. It was, however, in vain; he pleaded the royal promise, and relied on it. The Queen then said she would take a few days to consider the matter; when, examining into his character, and finding that he was a sober, moral man, as well as an intrepid commander, she sent for him, and gave him the Bishopric, saying that she "hoped he would take as good care of the Church, as he had done of the State."

UNPREACHING PRELATES.

The appointment of bishops and other ecclesiastics to lay offices, and more especially to places in the Mint, during the reign of Edward VI., was severely censured from the pulpit by the intrepid and venerable Bishop Latimer. In his "Sermon of the Plough," he says, with equal humour and vigour: "But now for the fault of unpreaching prelates, methinks I could guess what might be said for excusing them. They are so troubled with lordly living, they be so placed in palaces, couched in courts, ruffling in their rents, dancing in their _dominions_, burdened with embassages, pampering of their paunches, like a monk that maketh his jubilee, munching in their mangers, and moiling in their gay manors and mansions, and so troubled with loitering in their lordships, that they cannot attend it. They are otherwise occupied, some in King's matters, some are ambassadors, some of the Privy Council, some to furnish the Court, some are lords of the Parliament, some are presidents, comptrollers of Mints. Well, well, is this their duty? Is this their office? Is this their calling? Should we have ministers of the Church to be comptrollers of Mints? Is this a meet office for a priest that hath the cure of souls? Is this his charge? I would here ask one question: I would fain know who comptrolleth the devil at home at his parish, while he comptrolleth the Mint? If the apostles might not leave the office of preaching to be deacons, shall one leave it for minting? I cannot tell you; but the saying is, that since priests have been minters, money hath been worse than it was before." In another part of this discourse the Bishop proceeds to ask, "Is there never a nobleman to be a Lord President, but it must be a prelate? Is there never a wise man in the realm to be a comptroller of the Mint? I speak it to your shame, I speak it to your shame. If there be never a wise man, make a water-bearer, a tinker, a cobbler, a slave, a page, the comptrollers of the Mint. Make a mean gentleman, a groom, a yeoman; make a poor beggar, Lord President. Thus I speak, not that I would have it so, but to your shame, if there be never a gentleman meet nor able to be Lord President. For why are not the noblemen and young gentlemen of England so brought up in knowledge of God and in learning, that they might be able to execute offices in the commonweal?"

CHARLES II. AND HIS CHAPLAIN.

Dr. Hickringal, who was one of King Charles the Second's chaplains, whenever he preached before his Majesty, was sure to tell him of his faults from the pulpit. One day his Majesty met the Doctor in the Mall, and said to him, "Doctor, what have I done to you that you are always quarrelling with me?" "I hope your Majesty is not angry with me," quoth the Doctor, "for telling the truth." "No, no," says the king; "but I would have us for the future be friends." "Well, well," quoth the Doctor, "I will make it up with your Majesty on these terms: _as you mend I'll mend_."

RADCLIFFE'S ENMITY TO HANNES.

John Radcliffe, the eccentric, niggardly, self-indulgent, ill-educated, and intensely Jacobitish physician, who, at the end of the seventeenth century, rose to an eminent place in the capital and at Court, was the son of a comfortable Yorkshire yeoman. He resided for some years at Oxford University, and afterwards practised there; but in 1684 he went up to London, and speedily made himself a great name and income. As, however, at Oxford he had found enemies who, as was the fashion of these days, spoke very openly and bitterly against their rising rival--so was it also in London: Gibbons, Blackmore, and others, were hostile to the new-comer--the first expending his sarcasm on Radcliffe's defects of scholarship. Radcliffe replied, by fixing on Gibbons, as is well known the epithet of "_Nurse_;" ridiculing his mode of treatment by slops and gruels, and so forth,--Radcliffe's faith being placed in fresh air and exercise, generous nourishment, and the use of cordials. Sir Edward Hannes was, like Radcliffe, an Oxford man; and hence, perhaps, the peculiar jealousy and hatred with which he regarded Radcliffe. Hannes started in London, whither he followed Radcliffe, a splendid carriage and four, that drew upon it the eyes of all the town, and provoked Radcliffe, when told by a friend that the horses were the finest he had ever seen, to the savage reply, "Then he'll be able to sell them for all the more!" Hannes employed a stratagem that, in sundry shapes, has since been not quite unfamiliar in medical practice. He instructed his livery servants to run about the streets, and, putting their heads into every coach they met, to inquire in tones of anxiety and alarm, whether Dr. Hannes was there. Once one of these servants entered on this advertising errand Garraway's Coffeehouse, in Exchange Alley--a great resort of the medical profession; and called out, all breathless with haste, "Gentlemen, can any of your honours tell me if Dr. Hannes is here?" "Who wants Dr. Hannes, fellow?" asked Radcliffe, who was in the room. "Lord A----, and Lord B----," was the assurance of the servant. "No, no, my man," said Radcliffe, in a voice deliberate and full of enjoyment of the irony; "no, no, you are mistaken; it isn't the Lords that want your master, but he that wants them." Hannes was reputed the son of a basket-maker; Blackmore had been a schoolmaster--circumstances which furnished Radcliffe with material for a savage attack on both, when called in to attend the young Duke of Gloucester, for whom they had prescribed until the illness took a fatal turn. He accused them to their faces, and with no particular gentleness of language, for having abominably mismanaged a mere attack of rash; and said, "It would have been happy for this nation had you, Sir, been bred up a basket-maker, and you, Sir, remained a country schoolmaster, rather than have ventured out of your reach, in the practice of an art to which you are an utter stranger, and for your blunders in which you ought to be whipped with one of your own rods."

MATHEWS OH HIS DEATHBED.

A friend attending on Charles Mathews the Elder, the celebrated comedian, in his last illness, intending to give him his medicine, gave in mistake some ink from a phial on a shelf. On discovering the error, his friend exclaimed, "Good heavens! Mathews, I have given you ink." "Never--never mind, my boy--never mind," said Mathews, faintly, "I'll swallow a bit of _blotting-paper_."

BISHOP BERKELEY'S BERMUDA SCHEME.

Dr. George Berkeley, the Bishop of Cloyne--celebrated for his ideal theory, and by the praise of Pope, his stedfast friend, who ascribes "to Berkeley every virtue under heaven," as others ascribed to him all learning--in 1824 conceived and published his benevolent proposal for converting the American savages to Christianity, by means of a colony to be established in the Bermudas. The proposal was published in 1723, the year after he had been appointed Dean of Derry; and he offered to resign that opulent preferment, worth £1100 a year, and to dedicate the remainder of his life to the instruction of the Indians, on the moderate allowance of £100 a-year. The project was very favourably received, and persons of the highest rank raised considerable sums by subscription in aid of it. Berkeley having resigned his preferment, set sail for Rhode Island, to make arrangements for carrying out his views. Such was the influence of his distinguished example, that three of the junior Fellows of Trinity College, Dublin, abandoned with him all their flattering prospects in life in their own country, for a settlement in the Atlantic Ocean at £40 a-year. The Dean, not meeting with the support the ministry had promised him, and after spending nearly all his private property and seven of the best years of his life in the prosecution of his scheme, returned to Europe. This, however, he did not do, until the Bishop of London had informed him, that on application for funds to Sir Robert Walpole, he had received the following honest answer: "If you put this question to me as a minister, I must and I can assure you, that the money shall most undoubtedly be paid as soon as suits with the public convenience; but if you ask me as a friend, whether Dean Berkeley should continue in America, expecting the payment of £10,000, advise him, by all means, to return home to Europe, and give up his present expectations."

A HOME-THRUST AT STERNE.

Sterne, the reverend author of the _Sentimental Journey_, had the credit of treating his wife very ill. He was one day talking to Garrick, in a fine sentimental strain, in laudation of conjugal love and fidelity. "The husband," said he, "who behaves unkindly to his wife, deserves to have his house burnt over his head." "If you think so," replied Garrick, "I hope _your_ house is insured."

THE GOSPEL A NOVELTY.

When Le Torneau preached the Lent sermon at St. Benoit, at Paris, Louis XIV. inquired of Boileau, "if he knew anything of a preacher called Le Tourneau, whom everybody was running after?" "Sire," replied the poet, "your Majesty knows that people always run after novelties; this man preaches the gospel." The King pressing him to speak seriously, Boileau added: "When M. Le Tourneau first ascends the pulpit, his ugliness so disgusts the congregation that they wish he would go down again; but when he begins to speak, they dread the time of his descending." Boileau's remark as to the "novelty" of preaching the gospel in his time, brings to mind the candid confession of a Flemish preacher, who, in a sermon delivered before an audience wholly of his own order, said: "We are worse than Judas; he sold and delivered his Master; we sell Him too, but deliver Him not." Somewhat akin was the remark, in an earlier age, of Father Fulgentio, the friend and biographer of Paul Sarpi, and, like him, a secret friend to the progress of religious reformation. Preaching on Pilate's question, "What is truth?" he told the audience that he had at last, after many searches, found it out; and, holding forth the New Testament, said, "Here it is, my friends; but," he added sorrowfully, as he returned it to his pocket, "it is _a sealed book_."

HARVEY AND THE CIRCULATION OF THE BLOOD.

The discovery of the circulation of the blood was the most important ever made in the science of physiology, and led to a complete revolution throughout the whole circle of medical knowledge and practice. The renown of this splendid discovery, by all but universal consent, has been attributed to William Harvey, an English physician, who was born at Folkestone in 1578, and in 1593 went to Caius College, Cambridge, where he remained four years. He then went abroad for several years, studying in the most famous medical schools; and in 1604, having passed M.D. at Cambridge, he set up in practice in London. In 1615 he was appointed Lecturer at the College of Physicians, on Anatomy and Surgery; and it was in the performance of these duties that he arrived at the important discovery that is inseparably associated with his name. "The merit of Harvey," it has been justly observed, "is enhanced by considering the degraded state of medical knowledge at that time in England. While anatomical schools had been long established in Italy, France, and Germany, and several teachers had rendered their names illustrious by the successful pursuit of the science, anatomy was still unknown in England, and dissection had hitherto hardly begun; yet at this inauspicious period did Harvey make a discovery, which amply justifies Haller in ranking him as only second to Hippocrates." In 1620 he promulgated his new doctrine of the circulation of the blood, in a treatise entitled _Exercitatio Anatomica de Motu Cordis et Sanguinis in Animalibus_; in the preface to which, addressed to the College of Physicians, he states that frequently in his lectures he had declared his opinion touching the motion of the heart and the circulation of the blood, and had for more than nine years confirmed and illustrated that discovery by reasons and arguments grounded on ocular demonstration. The attention of all Europe, and the keen opposition of many of its medical scholars, were at once aroused by Harvey's publication; but his doctrine triumphed over all objections, and before he died he had the happiness of seeing it fully established. Harvey was physician to James I. and Charles I., the latter of whom had a high regard for him; and at the outbreak of the civil war he adhered to the royal side, and quitted London with the king, attending him at the battle of Edgehill, and afterwards at Oxford. He died in 1658, it is said from the effects of opium which he had taken with suicidal intent, while suffering under the acute pangs of gout. Posterity has been more faithful and grateful than his own age to the greatest modern discoverer in medical science; for his discovery rather tended to push him back than to advance him in professional position. It has been said that "perhaps his researches took him out of the common road to popular eminence, and they seem to have exposed him to the prejudice so commonly prevailing against an innovator; for we find him complaining to a friend, that his practice considerably declined after the publication of his discovery."

SUNDAY SPORTS.

Rushworth relates that King James, in 1618, in his _Declaration concerning Lawful Sports_, said that in his progress through Lancashire he did justly rebuke some Puritans and precise people for the prohibiting and unlawful punishment of his good people for using their lawful recreations and honest exercises upon Sundays and other holidays, after the afternoon sermon or service. "With his own ears he heard the general complaint of his people, that they were barred from all lawful recreations and exercise upon the Sundays after noon;" which must produce two great evils,--the first, the hindering the conversion of many whom the clergy caused to believe that religion, and honest mirth and recreation, were incompatible. "The other inconvenience is, that this prohibition barreth the common and meaner sort of people from using such exercises as may make their bodies more able for war when his Majesty, or his successors, shall have occasion to use them; and in place thereof, sets up tippling and filthy drunkenness, and breeds a number of idle and discontented speeches in alehouses. For when shall the common people have leave to exercise, if not upon the Sundays and holidays, seeing they must apply their labour, and win their living, on all working days? Therefore, the King said, his express pleasure was that no lawful recreation should be barred to his good people which did not tend to the breach of the laws of this kingdom and the canons of the Church: that after the end of divine service his people be not disturbed, letted, or discouraged from any lawful recreation, such as dancing, either men or women; archery for men, leaping, vaulting, or any other such harmless recreation; nor from having of May-games, Whitson-ales, and Morice-dances; and the setting up of Maypoles, and other sports therewith used, so as the same be had in due and convenient time, without impediment or neglect of divine service. And that women should have leave to carry rushes to the church for the decoring of it, according to their old custom." But bull and bear baiting, "interludes," and bowling (at all times prohibited to the meaner sort), were forbidden; all known recusants who abstained from coming to service were barred the liberty of recreation, "being unworthy of any lawful recreation after the service, that would not first come to the church and serve God;" as were also all who, though conforming in religion, had not been present in church. Each person was to go to church, and join the sports, in his own parish; and no weapons of offence were to be carried or used.