CHAPTER TEN WHICH SHOWETH THAT HE WHO PLAYS AT BOWLS, WILL SOMETIMES MEET WITHRUBBERS.
Sir Launcelot, boiling with indignation at the venality and faction of the electors, whom he had harangued to so little purpose, retired with the most deliberate disdain towards one of the gates of the town, on the outside of which his curiosity was attracted by a concourse of people, in the midst of whom stood Mr. Ferret, mounted upon a stool, with a kind of satchel hanging round his neck, and a phial displayed in his right hand, while he held forth to the audience in a very vehement strain of elocution.
Crabshaw thought himself happily delivered when he reached the suburbs, and proceeded without halting; but his master mingled with the crowd, and heard the orator express himself to this effect:--
"Very likely you may undervalue me and my medicine, because I don't appear upon a stage of rotten boards, in a shabby velvet coat, and tie-periwig, with a foolish fellow in a motley coat, to make you laugh, by making wry faces; but I scorn to use these dirty arts for engaging your attention. These paltry tricks, ad captandum vulgus, can have no effect but on idiots; and if you are idiots, I don't desire you should be my customers. Take notice, I don't address you in the style of a mountebank, or a High German doctor; and yet the kingdom is full of mountebanks, empirics, and quacks. We have quacks in religion, quacks in physic, quacks in law, quacks in politics, quacks in patriotism, quacks in government--High German quacks, that have blistered, sweated, bled, and purged the nation into an atrophy. But this is not all; they have not only evacuated her into a consumption, but they have intoxicated her brain, until she is become delirious; she can no longer pursue her own interest, or, indeed, rightly distinguish it. Like the people of Nineveh, she can hardly tell her right hand from her left; but, as a changeling, is dazzled and delighted by an ignis fatuus, a Will-o'-the-wisp, an exhalation from the vilest materials in nature, that leads her astray through Westphalian bogs and deserts, and will one day break her neck over some barren rocks, or leave her sticking in some H----n pit, or quagmire.
"For my part, if you have a mind to betray your country, I have no objection. In selling yourselves and your fellow-citizens, you only dispose of a pack of rascals who deserve to be sold. If you sell one another, why should not I sell this here Elixir of Long Life, which, if properly used, will protract your days till you shall have seen your country ruined. I shall not pretend to disturb your understandings, which are none of the strongest, with a hotchpotch of unintelligible terms, such as Aristotle's four principles of generation, unformed matter, privation, efficient, and final causes. Aristotle was a pedantic blockhead, and still more knave than fool. The same censure we may safely put on that wiseacre, Dioscorides, with his faculties of simples-- his seminal, specific, and principal virtues; and that crazy commentator, Galen, with his four elements, elementary qualities, his eight complexions, his harmonies and discords. Nor shall I expatiate on the alkahest of that mad scoundrel, Paracelsus, with which he pretended to reduce flints into salt; nor archaeus or spiritus rector of that visionary Van Helmont, his simple, elementary water, his gas, ferments, and transmutations; nor shall I enlarge upon the salt, sulphur, and oil, the acidum vagum, the mercury of metals, and the volatilised vitriol of other modern chemists, a pack of ignorant, conceited, knavish rascals, that puzzle your weak heads with such jargon, just as a Germanised m----r throws dust in your eyes, by lugging in and ringing the changes on the balance of power, the Protestant religion, and your allies on the continent; acting like the juggler, who picks your pockets while he dazzles your eyes and amuses your fancy with twirling his fingers and reciting the gibberish of hocus pocus; for, in fact, the balance of power is a mere chimera. As for the Protestant religion, nobody gives himself any trouble about it; and allies on the continent, we have none, or, at least, none that would raise an hundred men to save us from perdition, unless we paid an extravagant price for their assistance.