One of the most reprehensible arts to which the Reformers resorted in their hatred of popery, was that of adapting vulgar verses to church tunes, and thus associating with ludicrous images, or with something worse, melodies which had formerly been held sacred. It is related of Whitefield that he, making a better use of the same device, fitted hymns to certain popular airs, because, he said, “there was no reason why the Devil should keep all the good tunes to himself.” Green acted upon a similar principle when he took the field as a Physician Errant, with his man Kemp, like another Sancho for his Squire. But the Doctor was no Quixote; and his Merry Andrew had all Sancho's shrewdness, without any alloy of his simpleness. In those times medical knowledge among the lower practitioners was at the lowest point. Except in large towns the people usually trusted to domestic medicine, which some Lady Bountiful administered from her family receipt book; or to a Village Doctress whose prescriptions were as likely sometimes to be dangerously active, as at others to be ridiculous and inert. But while they held to their garden physic it was seldom that any injury was done either by exhibiting wrong medicines or violent ones. Herbs, Woods and Springs, the power that in you lies If mortal man could know your properties![1] There was at one time abundant faith in those properties. The holy Shepherdess in Fletcher's fine pastoral drama, which so infinitely surpasses all foreign compositions of that class, thus apostrophises the herbs which she goes out to cull: O you best sons of earth, You only brood unto whose happy birth Virtue was given, holding more of Nature Than man, her first-born and most perfect creature,— Let me adore you, you that only can Help or kill Nature, drawing out that span Of life and breath even to the end of time! So abundantly was the English garden stocked in the age of the Tudors, that Tusser, after enumerating in an Appendix to one of his Chapters two and forty herbs for the kitchen, fourteen others for sallads or sauces, eleven to boil or butter, seventeen as strewing herbs, and forty “herbs branches and flowers for windows and pots,” adds a list of seventeen herbs “to still in summer,” and of five and twenty “necessary herbs to grow in the garden for physic, not rehearsed before;” and after all advises his readers to seek more in the fields. He says, The nature of Flowers dame Physic doth shew; She teacheth them all to be known to a few. Elsewhere he observes that The knowledge of stilling is one pretty feat, The waters be wholesome, the charges not great. [Footnote 1: FLETCHER.]