With these facts before you, turn to your Shakespeare, and see how he regarded the popular delusions thus created and fostered, with their "Distinguished cheaters, prating mountebanks, And many such libertines of sin." --_Comedy of Errors._ Do you remember the other lines from this source, in which the poet speaks of "This pernicious slave," who "forsooth took on him as a conjurer, and, gazing in mine eyes, feeling my pulse, and with no face, as't were, outfacing me, cried out I was possessed." This is not the stern, grave doctor in "Macbeth," who did not pretend to "raze out the written troubles of the brain," but said, "Therein the patient must minister unto himself." There is no depreciation of the healing art in Shakespeare's painting of Lear's physician, as there is of the "caitiff wretch" of an apothecary, who sold poison to Romeo in a very different way to that in which the physician in Cymbeline supplied a deadly drug to the Queen. "I beseech your grace," says he, speaking in solemn earnestness, "without offence (my conscience bids me ask) wherefore you have commanded of me these most poisonous compounds." In "All's well that Ends Well," you will recognize the foregoing descriptions of medicinal delusions in the interview between Helena and the King, who says, we "may not be so credulous of cure, when our most learned doctors leave us, and the congregated college have concluded that labouring art can never ransom Nature from her maid estate, I say we must not so stain our judgment, or corrupt our hope, to prostitute our past-cure malady to empirics." In this play both "Galen and Paracelsus" are mentioned, and their names then represented rival schools of medicine. How smartly and merrily Shakespeare wrote of such cures as Greatrake professed to effect, we see in Henry VI., where Simpcox, supposed to be miraculously cured of blindness, is asked to and does describe what he sees, "If thou _hadst_ been born blind, thou might'st as well have known all our names as thus to name the several colours we do wear." In the "Merry Wives of Windsor" we have "Master Caius that calls himself doctor of physic," and is called by Dame Quickly a "fool and physician." The two were in Shakespeare's time very commonly combined, and often, as we have shown, very strangely. Dr. Caius was a real name borne by a learned gentleman who was physician to Queen Elizabeth. In Cymbeline the name of the physician is Cornelius. This again was the name of a real physician, who, in the sixteenth century, gained great reputation in Europe chiefly by restoring Charles V. to health after a tediously long illness. We may presume that Shakespeare was familiar with the fact.