The mountebank has long fallen from his former high estate. The quack may still be found vending his pills in the open-air markets of Yorkshire and Lancashire; but he does not mount a stage, and resembles his predecessors of the last century only in the fluency and volubility of his discourse on the virtues of his potions, pills, and plasters. The author of the paper on mountebanks in the "Book of Days" (edited by Robert Chambers), states that he saw one at York about 1860, who "sold medicines on a stage in the old style, but without the Merry Andrew or the music," and adds that "he presented himself in shabby black clothes, with a dirty white neck-cloth." Even the name had long before that time ceased to be connected with the vending of medicines, and had come to be applied to those itinerant circus companies who gave gratuitous performances in the open air, making their gains by the sale of lottery tickets. The present writer remembers seeing the circus company of John Clarke performing on a piece of waste ground at Lower Norwood, when the clown of the show went among the spectators selling tickets at a shilling each, entitling the holder to participate in a drawing, the prizes in which were Britannia metal tea pots and milk ewers, papier mache tea trays, cotton gown pieces, etc. That must have been about 1835, or within a year or two of that time. Only a few years later, a lottery in sixpenny shares was similarly conducted at Alfreton, in Derbyshire, and probably in many other places, though contrary to the provisions of the Lottery Act. The mountebank doctor of former times, with his carriage, his zany, and his musicians, can now only be met with in the provincial towns of France and Italy, and even there but seldom. Thirty or forty years ago, there was a man who, in a carriage drawn up behind the Louvre, used to practise dentistry and advertise his father, who had a flourishing dentist's practice in one of the narrow streets near the cathedral of Notre Dame. Another of this fraternity was seen at Marseilles by an English tourist a few years later, and in this instance some musicians accompanied the mountebank's phaeton, and drowned the cries of the suffering patients with the crash of a march. But these survivals remind us rather of _Belphegor_, in the pathetic drama of that name, than of _Dulcamara_ in the opera of _L'Elisor d'Amore_, with his gorgeous equipage and his musical attendants, as old play-goers remember the personation of the character by the famous Lablache. The Strange Story of the Fight with the Small-Pox. BY THOMAS FROST.