“If you will now see the pleasantest sight you have seen yet, walk up but these two steps, and you shall see a jury (or conspiracy) of barber-surgeons, sitting upon life and death.” You must think that any divertisement there was welcome, so that I went up, and found it in truth a very pleasant spectacle. These barbers were most of them chained by the middle, their hands at liberty, and every one of them a cittern about his neck, and upon his knees a chess-board; and still as he reached to have a touch at the cittern, the instrument vanished; and so did the chess-board, when he thought to have a game at draughts; which is directly tantalising the poor rogues, for a cittern is as natural to a barber as milk to a calf. Some of them were washing of asses’ brains, and putting them in again; and scouring of negroes to make them white. When I had laughed my fill at these fooleries, my next discovery was, of a great many people, grumbling and muttering, that there was nobody looked after them; no not so much as to torment them; as if their tails were not as well worth the toasting as their neighbours’. Answer was made, that being a kind of devils themselves, they might put in for some sort of authority in the place, and execute the office of tormentors. This made me ask what they were. And a devil told me (with respect) that they were a company of ungracious, left-handed wretches, that could do nothing aright. And their grievance was that they were quartered by themselves; but not knowing whether they were men or no, or indeed what else to make of them, we did not know how to match them, or in what company to put them. In the world they are looked upon as ill omens; and let any man meet one of them, upon a journey in a morning, fasting, ’tis the same thing as if a hare had crossed the way upon him; he presently turns head in a discontent, and goes to bed again. Ye know that Scævola, when he found his mistake, in killing another for Porsenna (the secretary, for the prince) burned his right hand in revenge of the miscarriage; now the severity of the vengeance, was not so much the maiming or the crippling of himself, but the condemning of himself to be for ever left-handed. And so ’tis with a malefactor that suffers justice; the shame and punishment does not lie so much in the loss of his right hand, as that the other is left. And it was the curse of an old bawd, to a fellow that had vexed her, that he might go to the devil by the stroke of a left-handed man. If the poets speak truth, (as ’twere a wonder if they should not) the left is the unlucky side; and there never came any good from it. And for my last argument against these creatures; the goats and reprobates stand upon the left hand, and left-handed men are, in effect, a sort of creature that’s made to do mischief; nay whether I should call them men, or no, I know not.