I remember Mr. Maitland at Child’s Coffee House, when the experiment was just begun at Newgate, was as confident and positive of the success and security proposed by inoculation as if he had had twenty years experience without any miscarriage, which made those who heard him justly suspect he was more concerned for the employ than for the success of it.[21] He had not the proper craft of this conscious rogue, for alongside his assertions of absolute competence and safety, he set forth such confessions of ignorance and disaster, that one is impelled to pronounce him a purblind enthusiast. For example, take this case, which he published without apparently any sense of its scope-- _2nd October, 1721._--After due preparation of the body, I engrafted Mary Batt, an infant of two years and a half old, daughter of Thomas Batt, a Quaker, living at Temple, within three miles of Hertford. The red spots and flushings appeared on her face and neck the fourth day; and she kept playing about well till the seventh or eighth, when she became a little heavy and thirsty, with a fuller and quicker pulse; then the pustules came out fresh and full, and the incisions discharged a thick and well digested matter. She had not above twenty in all upon her; they continued about three or four days, then dried away and fell off, and the child recovered perfectly. Thus far all was well; _but what happened afterwards was, I must own, not a little surprising to me, not having seen or observed anything like it before_. The case was in short this. Six of Mr. Batt’s domestic servants, namely, four men and two maids, who all in their turns were wont to hug and caress this child whilst under the operation, and the pustules were out upon her, never suspected them to be catching, _nor indeed did I_, were all seized with the right natural smallpox, of several and very different kinds; for some had the round distinct sort, some the small continued, and others the confluent; all of ’em had a great many, but especially the last, with the usual bad symptoms, _and very narrowly escaped_. But they all (God be thanked) did well (_except one maid_, that would not be governed under the distemper, _who died of it_,) and now enjoy a perfect state of health.[22] Thus at the outset, smallpox and death were the products of inoculation--the peril to be averted was incurred and multiplied. Yet the man who thus records his own infamous ignorance, had the impudence in the same pages to assert-- _The practice prudently managed, is always safe and useful, and the issue ever certain and salutary._[23] Words are wasted on such reckless folly: we perceive how true is Carlyle’s observation, “Stupidity intellectual always means stupidity moral, as you will, with surprise or not, discover if you look.” Before leaving Maitland, we may take another leaf from his experience. He writes--