Nicholas Culpepper was apprenticed to an apothecary in Great St. Helen’s, Bishopsgate, and at the same time a certain Marchmont Nedham was a solicitor’s clerk in Jewry Street. Nedham became the most notorious journalist in England, and founded and edited in turn the _Mercurius Britannicus_, an anti-royalist paper, the _Mercurius Pragmaticus_, violently anti-Commonwealth, and the _Mercurius Politicus_, subsidised by Cromwell’s government, and supervised by Mr. John Milton. This publication, amalgamated with the _Public Intelligencer_, its principal rival, has descended to us as the _London Gazette_. Probably Nedham and Culpepper were friends in their early days, and they may have been comrades in arms when the war broke out. But evidently they became fierce enemies later. In _Mercurius Pragmaticus_ Nedham, pretending to review Culpepper’s translation of the official Dispensatory, takes the opportunity of pouring on him a tirade of scurrilous abuse. The translation, he says, “is filthily done,” which was certainly not true. This is the only piece of criticism in the article. The rest deals with the author personally. Nedham informs his readers that Culpepper was the son of a Surrey parson, “one of those who deceive men in matters belonging to their most precious souls.” That meant that he was a Nonconformist. Nicholas himself, according to Nedham, had been an Independent, a Brownist, an Anabaptist, a Seeker, and a Manifestationist, but had ultimately become an Atheist. During his apprenticeship “he ran away from his master upon his lewd debauchery”; afterwards he became a compositor, then a “figure-flinger,” and lived about Moorfields on cozenage. After making vile insinuations about his wife, Nedham states that by two years’ drunken labour Culpepper had “gallimawfred the Apothecaries’ Book into nonsense”; that he wore an old black coat lined with plush which his stationer (publisher) had got for him in Long Lane to hide his knavery, having been till then a most despicable ragged fellow; “looks as if he had been stued in a tanpit; a frowzy headed coxcomb.” He was aiming to “monopolise to himself all the knavery and cozenage that ever an apothecary’s shop was capable of.” Culpepper’s works answer this spiteful caricature, for at any rate he must have been a man of considerable attainments, and of immense industry. That his writings acquired no little popularity is best proved by the fact that after his death it was good business to forge others somewhat resembling them and pass them off as his. TURQUET DE MAYERNE.