"Radcliffe was not endowed with a kindly nature," says another writer. "Meade, I love you," he is represented as saying to his fascinating adulator, "and I will tell you a secret to make your fortune. Use all mankind ill." Radcliffe had practised what he preached. Though mean and penurious, he could not brook meanness in others. The rich miser, John Tyson, approximating his end, magnanimously resolved to pay two of his three million guineas to Dr. Radcliffe for medical advice. The miserable old man, accompanied by his wife, came up to London, and tottered into the doctor's office at Bloomsbury Square. "I wish to consult you, sir; here are two guineas." "You may go, sir," exclaimed Radcliffe. The old miser had trusted that he was unknown, and he might pass for a poor wretch, unable to pay the five guineas expected from the wealthy, as a single consultation fee. "You may go home and die, and be d----d; for the grave and the devil are ready for Jack Tyson of Hackney, who has amassed riches out of the public and the tears of orphans and widows." As the miserable old man turned away, Radcliffe exclaimed, "You'll be a dead man in less than ten days." It required little medical skill, in the feeble condition of the old man, in order to give this correct prognosis. Radcliffe was the Barnum of doctors. "_Omnia mutantur, et nos mutamus in illis_," exclaimed Lotharius the First. But that "all things are changed, and we change with them," did not apply to medical humbugs during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries--no, nor in the nineteenth century, as we will show, particularly in our articles on Quacks and Patent Medicines. [Illustration: THE MISER OUTWITS HIMSELF.] The requisites essential to success are amusingly described by a writer of the former time, as follows:-- _First._ A decent black suit, and (if your credit will stretch so far), a plush jacket, not a pin the worse if threadbare as a tailor's cloak--it shows the more reverend antiquity. _Second._ You must carry a caduceus, or cane, like Mercury, capped with a civet-box (or snuff-box like Sir Richard's), and must walk with becoming gravity, as if in deep contemplation upon an arbitrament between life and death. _Third._ You must hire convenient lodgings in a respectable neighborhood, with a hatch[1] at the door; have your reception-room hung with pictures of some celebrated physicians, ancient historical scenes, and anatomical plates, and the floor belittered with gallipots and half-empty bottles. Any sexton will furnish your window with a skull, in hope of your custom. _Fourth._ Let your desk never be without some old musty Greek and Arabic authors, and on your table some work on anatomy, open at a picture page, to amuse, if not astonish spectators, and carelessly thrown on the same a few gilt shillings, to represent so many guineas received that morning as fees.