repeat the medical passages in Horace’s ‘Satires.’ In no country, however, can all the sick be always expected to recover even then, since “_Para todo hay remedio, sino para la muerte_”--“There is a remedy for everything except death.” If by chance the patient dies, the doctor and the disease bear the blame. Perhaps the old Iberian custom was the safest; then the sick were exposed outside their doors, and the advice of casual passengers was asked, whose prescriptions were quite as likely to answer as images, relics, snake-soup, or milk of almonds or asses:-- “And, doctor, do you really think That asses’ milk I ought to drink? It cured yourself, I grant, is true, But then ’twas mother’s milk to you.” [Sidenote: SNAKE-BROTH.] Nor, if the doctors knew how to prescribe them, are the nicer and most efficacious remedies, the preparations of modern chemical science, to be procured in any except the very largest towns; although, as in Romeo’s apothecary, “the needy” shelves are filled with empty boxes “to make a show.” The trade of a druggist is anything but free, and the numbers are limited; none may open a _Botica_ without a strict examination and licence; although, of course, this is to be had for money. None may sell any potent medicine, except according to the prescription of some _local_ medical man; everything is a monopoly. The commonest drugs are often either wanting or grossly adulterated, but, as in their arsenals and larders, no dispenser will admit such destitution; _hay de todo_, I have every thing, swears he, and gallantly makes up the prescription simply by substituting other ingredients; and as the correct ones nine times out of ten are harmless, no great injury is sustained. There is nothing new in this, for Quevedo, in his _Zahurdas de Pluton_, or Satan’s Pigsties, introduces a yellow-faced bilious judge scourging Spanish apothecaries for doing exactly the same, “Hence your shops,” quoth he, for he both preached and flogged, “are arsenals of death, whose ministers here get their pills (balls rather) which banish souls from the earth;” but these and other things have been long done with impunity, as Pliny said, no physician was ever hung for murder. One advantage of general distrust in drugs and doctors is, that the great masses of the people think very little about them or their complaints: thus they escape all fancied and imaginary complaints, which, if indulged in, become chronic, and more difficult to cure than those afflicting the body--for who can minister to a mind diseased? Again, from this want of confidence in remedies, very little physic at all is taken; owing to this limited demand, druggists’ shops are as rare in Spain as those of booksellers. No red, green, or blue bottles illuminate the streets at night, and there are more of these radiant orbs in the Fore street of the capital of the west of England, than in the whole capital of the Spains, albeit with a population six times greater. It