otium cum dignitate. When he favoured his friends and neighbours with an exhibition, it was speciali gratiá, and in a way that rather enhanced that dignity than derogated from it.

A performer of a very different kind used in those days to visit Ingleton in his rounds, where his arrival was always expected by some of the community with great anxiety. This was a certain Dr. Green, who having been regularly educated for the profession of medicine, and regularly graduated in it, chose to practice as an itinerant, and take the field with a Merry Andrew for his aid-de-camp. He was of a respectable and wealthy family in the neighbourhood of Doncaster, which neighbourhood on their account he never approached in his professional circuits, though for himself he was far from being ashamed of the character that he had assumed. The course which he had taken had been deliberately chosen, with the twofold object of gratifying his own humour, and making a fortune; and in the remoter as well as in the immediate purpose, he succeeded to his heart's content.

It is not often that so much worldly prudence is found connected with so much eccentricity of character. A French poetess, Madame de Villedieu, taking as a text for some verses the liberal maxim que la vertu dépend autant du temperament que des loix, says,

Presque toujours chacun suit son caprice;

Heureux est le mortel que les destins amis
Ont partagé d'un caprice permis.

He is indeed a fortunate man who if he must have a hobby-horse, which is the same as saying if he will have one, keeps it not merely for pleasure, but for use, breaks it in well, has it entirely under command, and gets as much work out of it as he could have done out of a common roadster. Dr. Green did this; he had not taken to this strange course because he was impatient of the restraints of society, but because he fancied that his constitution both of body and of mind required an erratic life; and that, within certain bounds which he prescribed for himself, he might indulge in it, both to his own advantage, and that of the community,-that part of the community at least among whom it would be his lot

to labour. Our laws had provided itinerant Courts of Justice for the people. Our church had formerly provided itinerant preachers; and after the Reformation when the Mendicant Orders were abolished by whom this service used to be performed, such preachers have never failed to appear during the prevalence of any religious influenza. Dr. Green thought that itinerant physicians were wanted; and that if practitioners regularly educated and well qualified would condescend to such a course, the poor ignorant people would no longer be cheated by travelling quacks, and sometimes poisoned by them!

One of the most reprehensible arts to which the Reformers resorted in their hatred of popery, was that of adapting vulgar verses to church tunes, and thus associating with ludicrous images, or with something worse, melodies which had formerly been held sacred. It is related of Whitefield that he, making a better use of the same device, fitted hymns to certain popular airs, because, he said," there was no reason why the Devil should keep all the good tunes to himself." Green acted upon a similar principle

when he took the field as a Physician Errant, with his man Kemp, like another Sancho for his Squire. But the Doctor was no Quixote ; and his Merry Andrew had all Sancho's shrewdness, without any alloy of his simpleness.

In those times medical knowledge among the lower practitioners was at the lowest point. Except in large towns the people usually trusted to domestic medicine, which some Lady Bountiful administered from her family receipt book; or to a Village Doctress whose prescriptions were as likely sometimes to be dangerously active, as at others to be ridiculous and inert. But while they held to their garden physic it was seldom that any injury was done either by exhibiting wrong medicines or violent ones.

Herbs, Woods and Springs, the power that in you lies
If mortal man could know your properties !*

There was at one time abundant faith in those properties. The holy Shepherdess in Fletcher's fine pastoral drama, which so infinitely surpasses all foreign compositions of that class, thus apostrophises the herbs which she goes out to cull:

*FLETCHER.

O you best sons of earth,

You only brood unto whose happy birth

Virtue was given, holding more of Nature

Than man, her first-born and most perfect creature,—

Let me adore you, you that only can

Help or kill Nature, drawing out that span

Of life and breath even to the end of time!

So abundantly was the English garden stocked in the age of the Tudors, that Tusser, after enumerating in an Appendix to one of his Chapters two and forty herbs for the kitchen, fourteen others for sallads or sauces, eleven to boil or butter, seventeen as strewing herbs, and forty "herbs branches and flowers for windows and pots," adds a list of seventeen herbs " to still in summer," and of five and twenty "necessary herbs to grow in the garden for physic, not rehearsed before;" and after all advises his readers to seek more in the fields. He says,

The nature of Flowers dame Physic doth shew;
She teacheth them all to be known to a few.

Elsewhere he observes that

The knowledge of stilling is one pretty feat,

The waters be wholesome, the charges not great.

In a comedy of Lord Digby's, written more