Old Ben, as usual, paints from life, having seen and heard more than once at Bartholomew and other fairs the drug-seller pacing his scaffold and exclaiming, “O, health, health! the blessing of the rich! the riches of the {192} poor! who can buy thee at too dear a rate, since there is no enjoying this world without thee.” Upon which the man makes game of the despicable “asses” his rivals, boasts of his incomparable panacea, into which enters a little human fat, which is worth a thousand crowns, but which he will part with for eight crowns, no, for six, finally for sixpence. A thousand crowns is what the cardinals Montalto and Farnese and his friend the Grand Duke of Tuscany have paid him, but he despises money and he makes sacrifices for the people. Likewise he has a little of the powder which gave beauty to Venus and to Helen; one of his friends, a great traveller, found it in the ruins of Troy and sent it him. This friend also sent a little of it to the French Court, but that portion had become “sophisticated,” and the ladies who use it do not obtain from it such good results.[243] Three years later, an English traveller, finding himself at Venice, was filled with wonder at the talk of the Italian mountebanks, and describing them, he too, from life, gave another copy of the same immutable original. “Truely,” wrote Coryat, “I often wondered at many of these natural orators. For they would tell their tales with such admirable volubility and plausible grace, even _extempore_, and seasoned with that singular variety of elegant jests and witty conceits, that they did often strike great admiration into strangers that never heard them before.” They sell “oyles, soueraigne waters, amorous songs printed, apothecary drugs, and a common-weale of other trifles. . . . I saw one of them holde a viper in his hand, and play with his sting a quarter of an houre together, and yet receive no hurt. . . . He made us all beleeve that the same viper was lineally descended from the generation of that viper that lept out of the fire upon St. Paul’s hand, in the island of Melita, now called Malta.”[244] {193} No doubt the loquacity, the volubility, the momentary conviction, the grace, the insinuating tone, the light, winged gaiety of the southern charlatan were not found so fully or so charmingly at the festivals of old England. These festivals were, however, merry and boisterous, attended by large crowds, among which moved many an artful character so full of jest and guile that Shakespeare thought them worthy of immortality; he gave it them indeed in creating, as a model of those men whose “revenue is the silly cheat,” his incomparable “Autolycus, a rogue.”