Closely allied with the “royal cramp rings” was the practice of “touching for the evil,” which is said to have commenced with Edward the Confessor, and was more or less continued to the reign of Queen Anne, for in Lent 1712 we find Dr. Johnson among the persons actually touched. The custom seems to have been at its height in the reign of Charles II., as in the four first years of his restoration he “touched” nearly 24,000 persons. Pepys, in his “Diary,” under June 23, 1666, records how he waited at Whitehall, “to see the King touch people for the king’s evil.” He did not come, but kept the poor persons waiting all the morning in the rain in the garden; but afterwards he touched them in the banqueting-house. And Evelyn records the fact that in the reign of Charles II. several persons were pressed to death in the crowd that surrounded the doors of the Court surgeon, where individuals applied for tickets in order to present their children for cure to the King. William III., says Macaulay, “had too much sense to be duped, and too much honesty to bear a part in what he knew to be an imposture.” “It is a silly superstition,” he exclaimed, when he heard that at the close of Lent his palace was besieged by a crowd of the sick; “give the poor creatures some money and send them away.” On one occasion he was importuned into laying his hand on a patient. “God give you better health,” he said, “and more sense.” But Queen Anne revived the superstition, and performed the healing-office during her progresses whenever she rested at any provincial city. At a late period the use of certain coins, known as “royal touch-pieces,” was in common vogue, which, being touched by the King, were supposed to ward off evil or scrofula, several of which are preserved in the British Museum; and Mrs. Bray speaks of a “Queen Anne’s farthing” being a charm for curing the king’s evil in Devonshire. The belief prevailed in France so lately as the coronation of Louis XVI., who is reported to have touched 2000 persons afflicted with scrofula. Indeed, this gift of healing was dispensed by the early French kings, and Laurentius, first physician to Henry IV. of France, asserts the power to have commenced with Clovis I. Bishop Elphinston, the founder of King’s College, Aberdeen, before his elevation to the episcopal dignity, while on an embassy from James III., King of Scots, to Louis XI., in a complimentary speech to the French monarch, congratulated him as the only prince to whom God had granted the peculiar gift of healing by the touch.