your malady in Greek, though it be but a cold, or headach; which by good endeavour and diligence he may bring to some moment indeed. His most unfaithful act is, that he leaves a man gasping, and his pretence is, death and he have a quarrel and must not meet; but his fear is, lest the carkass should bleed.[13] Anatomies, and other spectacles of mortality, have hardened him, and he is no more struck with a funeral than a grave-maker. Noble-men use him for a director of their stomach, and ladies for wantonness,[14] especially if he be a proper man.[15] If he be single, he is in league with his she-apothecary; and because it is the physician, the husband is patient. If he have leisure to be idle (that is to study,) he has a smatch at alcumy, and is sick of the philosopher's stone; a disease uncurable, but by an abundant phlebotomy of the purse. His two main opposites are a mountebank and a good woman, and he never shews his learning so much as in an invective against them and their boxes. In conclusion, he is a sucking consumption, and a very brother to the worms, for they are both engendered out of man's corruption. FOOTNOTES: [9] _The secretes of the reverende maister Alexis of Piemount, containyng excellente remedies against diuers diseases_, &c. appear to have been a very favourite study either with the physicians, or their patients, about this period. They were originally written in Italian, and were translated into English by William Warde, of which editions were printed at London, in 1558, 1562, 1595, and 1615. In 1603, a _fourth_ edition of a Latin version appeared at Basil; and from Ward's dedication to "the lorde Russell, erle of Bedford," it seems that the French and Dutch were not without so great a treasure in their own languages. A specimen of the importance of this publication may be given in the title of the first secret. "The maner and secrete to conserue a man's youth, and to holde back olde age, to maintaine a man always in helth and strength, as in the fayrest floure of his yeres." [10] _The Regiment of Helthe_, by Thomas Paynell, is another volume of the same description, and was printed by Thomas Berthelette, in 1541. 4to. [11] _Vespatian_, tenth emperor of Rome, imposed a tax upon urine, and when his son Titus remonstrated with him on the meanness of the act, "Pecuniam," says Suetonius, "ex prima pensione admovit ad nares, suscitans _num odore offenderetur_? et illo negante, atqui, inquit, e lotio est." [12] "Vpon the market-day he is much haunted with vrinals, where, if he finde any thing, (though he knowe nothing,) yet hee will say some-what, which if it hit to some purpose, with a fewe fustian words, hee will seeme a piece of strange stuffe." Character of an unworthy physician. "_The Good and the Badde_," by Nicholas Breton. 4to. 1618.