His retirement from the stage may be laid to the importunity of Mr. Theobald, who urged him to act in a play, for a moment attributed to Shakspeare, the "Double Falsehood." Booth struggled through the part of Julio, for a week, in the season of 1727-28, and then withdrew, utterly cast down, and in his forty-sixth year. Broxham, Friend, Colebatch, and Mead came with their canes, perukes, pills, and proposals, and failing to restore him, they sent him away from London. The sick player and his wife wandered from town to Bath, from the unavailing springs there to Ostend, thence to Antwerp, and on to Holland, to consult Boerhaave, who could only tell the invalid that in England a man should never leave off his winter clothing till midsummer-day, and that he should resume it the day after. From Holland the sad couple came home to Hampstead, and ultimately back to London, where fever, jaundice, and other maladies attacked Booth with intermitting severity. Here, in May 1733, a quack doctor persuaded him that if he would take "crude mercury" it would not only prevent the return of his fever but effectually cure him of all his complaints. As we are gravely informed that, within five days the poor victim "took within two ounces of two pounds weight of mercury," we are not surprised to hear that at the end of that time Booth was _in extremis_, and that Sir Hans Sloane was at his bedside to accelerate, as it would seem, the catastrophe. To peruse what followed is like reading the details of an assassination. As if the two pounds, minus two ounces, of mercury were not enough, poor Booth was bled profusely at the jugular, his feet were plastered, and his scalp was blistered; he was assailed in various ways by cathartics, and mocked, I may so call it, by emulsions; the _Daily Post_ announced that he lay a-dying at his house in Hart Street, other notices pronounced him moribund in Charles Street; but he was alive on the morning of the 10th of May 1733, when a triad of prescriptions being applied against him, Cato at length happily succumbed. But the surgeons would not let the dead actor rest; they opened his body, and dived into its recesses, and called things by strong names, and avoided technicalities; and, after declaring everything to be very much worse than the state of Denmark, as briefly described by _Hamlet_, Alexander Small, the especial examiner, signing the report, added a postscript thereto, implying that "There was no fault in any part of his body, but what is here mentioned." Poor fellow! We are told that he recovered from his fever, but that he died of the jaundice, helped, I think, by the treatment.