How have you gathered all the minor sewers into one cloaca maxima, and discharged the whole upon my innocent head! Have you never a friend or relation or well-wisher? Did you never meet a plain-dealer to give you a dose of candour? That would have cured you. You are dropsical, man; you are like to burst with it; and you take it for muscular healthy stoutness; you are congratulated only by the fools who do not see what is the matter; the instructed cannot help being sorry for you. But here in good time comes Sopolis; we will put you in the good doctor's hands, tell him all about it, and see if anything can be done for you. He is a clever man; he has taken many a helpless semi-lunatic like you in hand and dosed him into sanity.--Good day, Sopolis. Lexiphanes here is a friend of mine, you know. Now I want you to undertake his case; he is afflicted with a delirious affection of the vocal organs, and I fear a complete breakdown. Pray take measures to cure him. _Lex_. Heal him, not me, Sopolis; he is manifestly moon-struck; persons duly pia-matered he accounts beside their five wits; he might come from Samos and call Mnesarchus father; for he enjoins silence and linguinanity. But by the unabashed Athene, by Heracles the beast-killer, no jot or tittle of notice shall he have from me. 'Tis my foreboding that I fall not in with him again. For his censures, I void my rheum upon them. _Sop_. What is the matter with him, Lycinus? _Ly_. Why, _this_ is the matter; don't you hear? He leaves us his contemporaries, and goes a thousand years off to talk to us, which he does by aid of these tongue-gymnastics and extraordinary compounds-- prides himself upon it, too, as if it were a great thing to disguise yourself, and mutilate the conversational currency. _Sop_. Well, to be sure, this is a serious case; we must do all we can for him. Providentially, here is an emetic I had just mixed for a bilious patient; here, Lexiphanes, drink it off; the other man can wait; let us purge you of this vocal derangement, and get you a clean bill of health. Come along, down with it; you will feel much easier. _Lex_. I know not what you would be at, you and Lycinus, with your drenches; I fear me you are more like to end than mend my speech. _Ly_. Drink, quick; it will make a man of you in thought and word. _Lex_. Well, if I must. Lord, what is this? How it rumbles! I must have swallowed a ventriloquist.