1830.] Affairs in General 689 



acquiesce in the necessity of the case, and look out for some other rubber 

 of their backs and bosoms. 



As to Captain Loyd and his unlucky wife, we know not what species 

 of brains may have been vouchsafed to them ; but to us it seems the most 

 extraordinary idea in the lady to have anticipated illness by making her- 

 self ill ; and in the Captain, to have patronized so ready a contrivance 

 for getting rid of " all the ills that flesh is heir to." As to the quack 

 himself, we can almost pardon his ignorance for the sake of his tempta- 

 tion. When he saw the old radical Burdett, who is as tenacious of a 

 farthing as another man would be of a guinea, coming to be rubbed at 

 the expense of a fee, he must have thought himself qualified to work 

 more miracles than upon the lady ; or, when he saw the Marchioness of 

 Ormond coming, with her three daughters in hand, to be rubbed by him ; 

 or half a hundred others, of the same class, as " silly as their sheep," 

 soliciting him for a cheering drop of aquafortis, or a cooling lotion of oil 

 of vitriol, he must have believed that either the people were mad, or he 

 was something supernatural. When the money of these titled fools came 

 pouring in upon him, who can wonder if he held out his hand to grasp 

 it. They would have thrown it away on some other absurdity for such 

 people are palpably incapable of making any rational use of money ; and 

 if St. John had absorbed their guineas by the thousand, in return for his 

 bottles of spirits of wine, dear to the hearts of ladies of a certain age ; or 

 his prepared drams, which some of them seem to have adopted as regular 

 cosmetics, and others as merely the pleasant companions of their private 

 hours, we should have had no tears for the diminished purses of those 

 ridiculous people. 



But what we abominate in the fellow is his gross heartlessness. When 

 he saw that poor Miss Cashin was dying the victim much less of the 

 quack than of the foolish woman who put her into his hands we find 

 no regret for the unfortunate creature's agony no alarm for its conse- 

 quences, which he must have dreaded not a syllable of anything but 

 congratulation on the charming effect of his medicine ; and upon this 

 he takes his hat, and walks away to some similar operation. The girl 

 is dying at the moment, in the most horrid of all sufferings the tortures 

 of coming mortification ; he offers no mitigation, or none of any use. 

 We hear of nothing further, but the fruitless calling in of a surgeon by 

 the family : the surgeon finds that he can do nothing and the poor girl 

 perishes. It is utterly impossible to believe that the judges, on this 

 occasion, were more correct in their law than they were true to common 

 sense. The law allows no man to say one thing, and do another to sell 

 potatoe-flour for wheat, or dose us with sawdust or plaister of Paris for 

 the assize loaf. 



In like manner, it cannot suffer a quack to sell us poison for medicine, 

 or rub us into a mortification, on the pretext of securing us against con- 

 sumption. In fact, the law is created for the protection of the subject 

 against all evil doers ; it smites the swindler of a sixpence and why 

 shall it not smite the swindler of a life ? Why does it demand that 

 medical men shall take degrees at colleges, except for the purpose of 

 securing us against the ignorance of quacks ; and if those precautions 

 are universal in all civilized countries, why is a fellow like St. John 

 Long to be suffered to practise on the credulity of hypocondriacs 

 and pampered women, with more money than brains ? It is to 

 prevent fools from being duped by their own folly, that three- 



M.M. New Series VOL. X. No. 59. 4 S 



