This narration, which is made in French rhyme and is too long for reproduction, naturally leads the doctor to prescribe for the impudent _valet_, who proposes to pay him a hundred crowns for enough poison to kill his master. The physician is angry and revengeful at the same time at the _valet’s_ dreadful proposition, but, restraining himself, he accepts the gold and gives Thomas in place of poison only a soporific liquor; this the valet brings to his mistress, Marsilie. Now, Antoine, the only son of Marsilie by Phocus, returning from the chase, sees the flagon of liquor, and, mistaking it for wine, swallows the contents at one draught. He falls to the floor unconscious and all believe him dead. Marsilie accuses Fabrice of poisoning his stepbrother; the unfortunate young man is taken before the judge, who condemns him to death; he is about to be executed, when the physician enters on the scene, tells all that has passed, and restores to life the supposed dead Antoine. Marsilie is tried and found guilty and repudiated by her husband and family; and Fabrice becomes dearer than ever to his father. Without making further commentaries on this piece, we see the place occupied on the stage by medicine in the Middle Ages and the social standing of the physician in polite society. We also note the _irregular_ practice of the doctor, as well as the high standard of professional honor he maintained in many instances. THE GOUT. This tragedy, in poetic form, was composed towards the close of the sixteenth century by J. D. L. Blambeausaut. It has only three scenes, and depicts the triumph of the gout. The poet describes an old man overcome by the multiple pains of podagra, praying to obtain some slight respite from the atrocious and agonizing pain he endures. The Gout, an ever malevolent deity, rejects the old man’s prayer for help, but carries him into a gathering of doctors who are vaunting, in mutual admiration society fashion, their power in jugulating all forms of disease and exalting their specifics for every known affection. In order to punish these arrogant disciples of Æsculapius for their presumption, the Gout gives them all the disease that bears his name, and afterwards jeers at their impotent efforts to cure themselves of aching joints. This tragedy, name given by the author of the poem, is a very curious treatise on the gout in rhyme, in which we find all the pathogenetic theories given credence before the time that medical chemistry revealed the action of an excess of uric acid in the organism. The blood, bile, peccant humors settling in the parts affected were, as we all know, causes attributed to diathesis by the majority of medical authors of the Middle Ages. Thus the gout-afflicted man, in his imprecations against what he calls “the torturer of humanity,” comes to say: