In the reign of George III., although the fool did not exist as a professional man, we have an instance of a professional man enacting the fool, with good intent and profitable purpose. The person alluded to is the learned and laughter-loving Dr. William Battie, who was a well-reputed London physician in portions of the reigns of George II. and his successor. He was celebrated for his treatment of the insane; and is thus described in the ‘_Battiad_,’ a poem of which he was the hero. “First Battas came, deep read in worldly art, Whose tongue ne’er knew the secrets of his heart. In mischief mighty, though but mean of size, And, like the Tempter, ever in disguise. See him with aspect grave and gentle tread, By slow degrees approach the sickly bed; Then, at his club, behold him alter’d soon, The solemn doctor turns a low buffoon.” But Battie could play the fool, even to better purpose by the sick bed, than the buffoon at his club. It is told of him that he had a young male patient whom obstinate quinsy threatened with almost instant suffocation. Battie had tried every remedy but his foolery, and at last he had recourse to _that_. Setting his wig wrong side before, twisting his face into a compound comic expression, and darting his head suddenly within the curtains, he cut such antics, poured forth such delicious folly, and was altogether so irresistible, that his patient, after gazing at him for a moment in stupefaction, burst into a fit of laughter which broke the imposthume, and rescued the sufferer from impending death. The above, however, is only a sample of how a professional man could apply folly to a wise end. We have something more resembling the professional fool or dwarf, in the case of a retainer of the Duke of Ancaster who died in 1779. Walpole mentions him in a letter to Lady Ossory. “I hear the Duke of Ancaster has left a legacy to a very small man that was always his companion, and whom, when he was drunk, he used to fling at the heads of the company, as others fling a bottle.” Although, professionally, the vocation had gone, it is still worth observing, that other patent places which had originated in feudal times, had not gone with that of the jester. “If my memory does not deceive me,” says Burke in his speech on the royal household, in 1780, “a person of no slight consideration held the office of patent hereditary cook to an Earl of Warwick.” The orator rightly conjectured that the Earl’s soups “were not the better for the dignity of his kitchen;” and he adds his belief that “an Earl of Gloucester officiated as steward of the household to the Archbishops of Canterbury.” The orator found a curious relic of those old times when these practices were common, in the household of George III. He did not meet with any witty fellow there patented as fool, but he discovered something akin to it; namely, that the turnspit in the King’s kitchen was a Member of Parliament!