harm. That is as far from being true as their knowledge is far from truth. To inspect Reece or Buchan, and administer whatever chance, or the cook dictates, is their only rule. They do not know or reflect that it is the disease, not the medicine, which is to be known, that in no two stages does the same disease admit the same remedies, that a name is not a disease, that the same named disease is not the same disease, even in two individuals, and that, even were all this so, they have not the means of knowing one disease from another. If the books of Buchan, Reece, and the rest, had been burned by the common hangman, it would have been an act worthy of the law which sets up to regulate the practice of physic as a profession, and leaves all interlopers and dilettantes free to commit murder at pleasure.

If the Bountifuls do no harm, they need not do any thing: if their medicines are neutral, they are useless. But even neutral medicines, bread-pills if they please, do harm, if they divert the patient from attending to an insidious disease, and keep off the only advice that ought to be sought. The fact itself is matter of daily occurrence. There is a colic, perhaps, (we must illustrate at the risk of professional language) and my lady administers peppermint. By to-morrow, the apothecary, who ought to have been seat for yesterday, is called in, and mortification has commenced. The patient dies, and the Bountiful continues the same career.

As to the facts, the truth of all this, and much more, of all that we have said and much that we might have said, we leave it to the experience of those who have had experience in the Bountiful practice. We have seen mothers kill their children, as effectually as if they had administered poison; and this, even in defiance of advice and caution. We could name an instance where a mother exterminated in succession her whole family, of seven children; and it is an instance not known to ourselves alone. The truth is, that instead of being innocent, their practice is often extremely and dangerously active. When they take to the lancet, they will complete it. In a minor way, perhaps, it is notorious to the whole world, that the great mass of failures in vaccination has arisen from the interference of women and country curates, or of others attempting what they could not understand. Thus chiefly has discredit been brought on this useful discovery. And thus also does a collateral mischief arise from the prevalence of this dilettante vanity and conceit. Every woman, and now most men, have learned to read their prescriptions, and to reason in their own way about them, with numerous evil results. As far as the power of medicine influences the disease through the imagination, it is often rendered useless or pernicious. Thus also they decline that, of which they pretend to judge better than the practitioner, or alter or increase the doses, or, to use a fashionable phrase, cheat the doctor, forgetting that it is themselves they are cheating. Thus also a physician is often deterred from the use of a powerful or a probable remedy, knowing that the blame of failure will be laid on himself and the medicine, not on the disease; and thus also any bad change in its symptoms or progress, is attributed to the medicine administered, to the loss of the physician's reputation.

And now perhaps we might leave the Lady Bountifuls to God and their own consciences, did we think they possessed any in this matter.

As far as relates to their own personal self-practice, we would rather try to influence them by assuring them that they ruin, by their calomel and salts, the beauty which they are so anxious to preserve and improve. We would try to influence them in this also, by telling them that they render themselves odious to our sex; peevish, fretful, anxious, gloomy, and irascible. We might tell them that they become nervous, and that there is nothing which man so abhors as a nervous woman. We might also tell them, that, to practice physic, is a masculine assumption which a man detests; that to practice on themselves, to frequent Cheltenham and to talk of its necessity; that to be acquainted with medical terms, and to talk, or even insinuate, physic, in any of its forms or modes, is nauseating and disgusting; and that love flies, as it did from Celia, at the repulsive notions excited by physic, apothecaries, calomel, and the whole detestable jargon.

BUTLERIANA,

FROM UNPUBLISHED MANUSCRIPTS.

No. III.

[WE continue our extracts from the singular hoard of similes, allusions, and reasonings, which the author of Hudibras was in the habit of accumulating in his common-place book. The present selection is made from a mass of the same kind, under the head of ASTROLOGY. We have avoided such as the author had used in

his admirable poem.-ED.]

How planets in conjunction, ev'ry minute

Are chopt and chang'd, yet do their bus'ness in it:

While those that since the world's original

Have been unfix'd, yet never could forestall.

As 'tis impertinent for cheats to fix

Among the understanders of their tricks

But rather strive to change the air and stroll

To catch the ignorant, unwary fool.

Whence 'tis the stars that dwell in th' upper æther,

Have all their interests only in the weather:

As their influences are said by some

To give us what they never had at home:

So all their other operations tend

To as ridiculous and vain an end.

For there's no other work of nature else
But equally the events of things foretells.
As monsters that for nothing were designed,
With omens and predictions stock mankind :
And greatest empires steered their interests
With flights of birds and garbages of beasts,
Or he that future earthquakes could foretell
By feeling mud 'ith bottom of a well,
As true as conjuring with Virgil's verse
T'unriddle all men's fates and characters.
For all the stars conjunctions and eclipses
Predict but picking pockets worse than gypsies.

The ancients held no omen was so dire

As to spill water when they talk'd of fire.

And that the certain'st schemes they had of thieves
Portended those that use to wear long sleeves.

Believ'd the stars knew less of our affairs,
And are as unconcern'd as we of their's:

Or how so many mortals upon their centres

Should be hang'd up with all their weights like tenters.

The sun and moon in heaven, at so vast
A geometric distance have been placed
That all their different dimensions, here

Do of a seeming magnitude appear.

Some make the sun to the under-earth draw near

So many scores of his diameter,

But cannot tell if the ancient's days and hours
Were of a less or greater length than ours:
But have no more ground than astrologers
Have for their worms and maggots of the stars.
But have less sense for all they undertake
Than all their frenzies in the Zodiack.

Whether the fix'd stars are but holes, to pass
Th' Empyreum through in bright effluvias,
Or suns to other worlds, it is no matter
To all our own discoveries in nature.
When all that's truly useful in th' art
Is no more than the mere mechanic part;
And if they strive to aim beyond, their rules
Will not fit nature and their Gresham schools.
For though the earth be round, yet every span
Of the superficies, rests upon a plane,
Or else the antipodes could never meet
On equal terms, but with their feet to feet.
But every packet boat, or petty trader,

Had sunk in the air and founder'd down to Nadir.
So those that made a planet of the sun,

Were ignorant of what themselves had done
When there's so vast a difference betwixt
The rest and him, the world believes he's fixt;
And all their notions of a planet were
To be the thickest part of all it's sphere.

Can take the height of stars, yet do not know
Whether they are above them, or below,
Believed the spheres were but a nest of boxes
Only designed for holding Paradoxes;
Whence that of fire, has been so long retrench'd
Of all they had contrived it for and quench'd.

Have beat their brains, about a freak and worm,
To square the circle, they could ne'er perform,
Things so absurd ridiculous and wild,
That now they will not pass upon a child,

For he that only looks among the stars
To find the dark events, of peace and wars
And not among the affairs of active men
Does ten times more ridiculously then
He that took pills for finding out his ass,
Although by accident it comes to pass.

For those are frequent'st by the star's detected
Whom most of all the wizard finds suspected;
Is sure to be his own significator
Whose influence they most look after,

And if the Heavens be but one constellation
As all to any have the same relation,
(Except those two erroneous vagabonds,
With which the earth as fully corresponds,)
The whole to all the rest may freely claim
An equal property, beside the name.
Astrology and magic charms and spells
Are all that's left of the devils oracles.
Have acted greater diabolic sorceries
Than all the litters of his Lapland nurseries;
The best astrologers are always made
Of crack'd mechanicks of some other trade,
And when the planets are designed to err,
How much more must the dull astrologer :
When those, he is to be directed by,
Are nam'd from fraud, imposture, and a lie!
And have their most erroneous sant'rings made,
The principles, and basis of a trade.

For tradesmen and mechanicks are the primest
And best of all astrologers and chymists.
Only the devil is, yourselves aver

The most profound and deep astrologer;
With whom no other, ever durst compare
For as he's prince and sultan of the air;
Without whose licence and commission had,
No influences dare presume to trade;
For 'tis but labour thrown away, t' incline
Unless he give them special quarantine;
And he, who perfect'st understands their use,
Does equally know where, to pick and choose,
Then whether you apply yourselves to him,
This way or any else 'tis but a whim.

As those that buy a salmon draught,
Pay for the fish before 'tis caught;
Suppose a figure calculated,
The geniture exactly stated;
Another of the self same person
With equal care and animadversion
By way of hoary inspection

The effect, of this, or that erection
Must be the very same, or else
The one or both must need be false.

When all your several ways of virtuosing
Are but a formal sort, of dry deboshing:
Which made the ancients celebrate an owl
As the only proper Philosophic Fowl.
Fools are familiars to themselves
That serve the cunning men for elves,
And make them only pimp and set,
And own the tricks, they counterfeit,
That hire and prompt them to detect,
The parties whom they must suspect;
And tell them first what kind of men
That they may tell it them again
And with their learning lay the elves
They only conjured up themselves.

The factories of folly and imposture,

That with the weak and ignorant pass muster:
Astrology and all those monstrous fictions,
To cheat the world with counterfeit predictions

JAN. 1826.

That serve for nothing, if they should be true,
But to take up misfortune, ere 'tis due,
For comets, eclipses, still forbode
Destruction to mankind, but never good;
With chiromancy, horoscopy, and cabal
The drums and rattles of the Scottish rabble,
With all the vain impertinent delusions
Of frantic and fanatic Rosicrucians,

All meant for scarecrows false and counterfeit,
To fright the world out of its little wit:
For all their stiff formalities of arts,

Are no more reverend, than the beards of warts.
Their patent planetary intelligences
And secret virtues of their influences,
That like mechanic theory, in small
Designs will hold, but greater not at all.
For did not once astrologers persuade
The inhuman Emp'ror Nero to evade
The dire destruction which a star did seem
To aim and level purposely at him:
So frustrate all the black designs of fate,
And turn their sad effects upon the state,
That think their talents most adroit
For any mystical exploit ;

To deal in love and news, and weather,
And thieves and matches altogether.

For witches are no sooner taken
But by their treacherous imps forsaken;
And when by law they're seized upon
Are only hang'd for being none.

As Empson with the sieves he wrought,
Could never find his fortune out.

One night the sun far more obscures,
Than all the ecclipses he endures,
All points of Heaven are at noon
As soon as entered by the sun.

The moon herself does never steal the light
She pilfers from the sun but in the night:

The sea itself, throws up the beach and sand,
That keeps it from incroaching on the land:
The Hebrew calendar did never cast
The year's account up till 'twas gone and past;
Which shows they gave no credit to the stars
Or those that prompted them, astrologers.

Did not Menippus mounted in the moon,
Discover all that upon earth was done?

Or, she at the entrance of the eclipse, foreshow
The Macedonian kings overthrow?

And did not only make the dire portent

But was the real cause of the event,

For the ancient Romans, only by their cunning
In our profession, stoutly overrun him.
And if we can the eclipse itself fortell
Why should we not the event of it as well:
A prophet has no need of being wise
When all his art in dreams and visions lies.

For he that for his profit's brought t'obey
Is only hired, on liking, to betray:

Hudibras.
H