In one respect we have but very little occasion to extol our own enlightened age at the expence of those ages which are so frequently and justly termed _dark_. We allude to the bold and artful designs of imposture, and particularly _medical imposture_. Daily are seen illiterate and audacious empirics sporting with the lives of a credulous public, that seem obstinately resolved to shut their ears against all the suggestions of reason and experience. The host of empirics, mountebanks, and self-dubbed hygeists, which infest the metropolis, and the tinctures, cordials, pills, balms, and essences, so much extolled by their retailers, and swallowed by the public, are indeed so many proofs of the credulity of the age, that to say the least, the march of intellect has evidently made a _faux-pas_ in this direction. The celestial beds, the enchanting magnetic powers introduced into this country by Messmer, a German quack, and his numerous disciples, the prevailing indifference to all dietetic precepts, the singular imposition practised on many females, in persuading them to wear the inert acromatic belts, the strange infatuation of the opulent in paying five guineas for a pair of _metallic tractors_, not worth sixpence, the tables for blood-letting, and other absurdities still inserted in popular almanacs, (against all the rules of common sense)--all these yield in nothing to the absurdities and superstitious notions conveyed through the medium of astrology, dreams, and other ludicrous though by far more imposing and interesting channels. The temple of the gulls is now thronged with votaries as much as that of superstition formerly was; human reason is still a slave to the most tyrannical prejudices; and certainly, there is no ready way to excite general attention and admiration, than to deal in the mysterious and the marvellous. The visionary system of Jacob Böhman has latterly been revived in some parts of Germany. The ghosts and apparitions which had disappeared from the times of Thomasius and Swedenborg, have again left their graves, to the great terror of fanaticism. New prophets announce their divine mission, and, what is worse, find implicit believers! The _inventors_ of _secret_ medicines are rewarded by patents, and obtain no small celebrity; while some of the more conscientious, but less fortunate adepts, endeavour to amuse the public with popular systems of medicine.