THE NEWCASTLE APOTHECARY

Next morning early, Bolus rose,

And to the patient's house he goes
Upon his pad,

Who a vile trick of stumbling had:

It was, indeed, a very sorry hack;
But that 's of course

For what 's expected from a horse

With an apothecary on his back?

Bolus arrived, and gave a doubtful tap,
Between a single and a double rap.

Knocks of this kind

Are given by gentlemen who teach to dance,

By fiddlers, and by opera-singers;

One loud, and then a little one behind,

As if the knocker fell, by chance,

Out of their fingers.

The servant lets him in with dismal face,

Long as a courtier's out of place

Portending some disaster.

John's countenance as rueful looked and grim,

As if the apothecary had physicked him,

And not his master.

"Well, how's the patient?" Bolus said. John shook his head.

"Indeed!-hum! ha!—that's very cdd!

He took the draught?" John gave a nod.

“Well, how? what then? speak out, you dunce!"

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64

"Why, then," says John, "we shook him once"

Shook him!-how?" Bolus stammered out.

"We jolted him about "—

"Zounds! shake a patient, man! a shake won't

do."

"No, sir, and so we gave him two."

'Twould make the patient worse."

"It did so, sir, and so a third we tried."

"Well, and what then?"--" Then, sir, my master

died."

-GEORGE COLEMAN, THE YOUNGER.

Boyle Godfrey, Chymist and Doctor of
Medicine

EPITAPHIUM CHEMICUM.

ERE lieth to digest, macerate, and amalgamate with clay,

In Balneo Arena,

Stratum super stratum,

The Residuum, Terra Damnata, and Caput Mortuum,
Of Boyle Godfrey, Chimist
And M. D.

A man who in this earthly Laboratory
Pursued various processes to obtain
Arcanum Vitæ,

Or the Secret to Live;

Also Aurum Vitæ,

Or the art of getting, rather than making, Gold.
Alchemist like,

All his labor and propition,

As Mercury in the fire, evaporated in fumo.
When he dissolved to his first principles,
He departed as poor

As the last drops of an alembic:

For riches are not poured

On the Adepts of this world.
Thus,

Not Solar in his purse,

Neither Lunar in his disposition,
Nor Jovial in his temperament;
Being of Saturnine habit,
Venereal conflicts had left him,
And Martial ones he disliked.
With nothing saline in his composition,
All Salts but two were his Nostrums.

The Attic he did not know,

BOYLE GODFREY, CHYMIST

And that of the Earth he thought not Essential;
But, perhaps, his had lost its savor.
Though fond of news, he carefully avoided
The fermentation, effervescence,

And decupilation of this life.

Full seventy years his exalted essence
Was hermetically sealed in its terrene matrass;
But the radical moisture being exhausted,
The Elixir Vitæ spent,

Inspissated and exsiccated to a cuticle,
He could not suspend longer in his vehicle,
But precipitated gradatim

Per companum

To his original dust.

May that light, brighter than Bolognian Phosphorus,
Preserve him from the Incineration and Concremation
Of the Athanor, Empyreuma, and Reverberatory
Furnace of the other world,

Depurate him, like Tartarus Regeneratus,
From the Faces and Scoria of this;
Highly rectify and volatilize

His Etherial Spirit,

Bring it over the helm of the Retort of this Globe,
Place in a proper Recipient,

Or Crystalline Orb,

Among the elect of the Flowers of Benjamin,
Never to be saturated

Till the general Resuscitation,
Deflagration, and Calcination of all Things,
When all the reguline parts

Of his comminuted substance
Shall be again concentrated,
Revivified, alcholized,
And imbibe its pristine Archeses;
Undergo a new transmutation,

Eternal fixation,

And combination of its former Aura;

Be coated over and decorated in robes more fair

Than the majestie of Bismuth,

79

More sparkling than Cinnabar,
Or Aurum Mosaicum.

And being found Proof Spirit,

Then to be exalted and sublimed together
Into the Concave Dome

Of the highest Aludel in Paradise.

-DR. CHARLES Smith.

The Old Doctor

F

'HEY'VE got a new man down hyere
At Mason's Cove, thet 's young
An' got a heap o' l'arnin'

An' quite a 'ily tongue.

I've nothin' no-way 'ginst him,
But tell ye when I'm sick
I want old Dr. Milspaugh,

An' I want him mighty quick!

He's doctored all my fambly
For sixty year, ye know,
An' when he could n't cure us
He never told us so!
He never gave a case up

Like doctors sometimes do,

But let us die a-hopin'

Thet we was pullin' through.

'N' most I like about him

Is that he never tries
New-fangled drugs upon ye,

Like some thet ain't so wise.
No differ what 's your yailment,
He'll give ye calermel;
Ef thet don't work he 'll dose ye

With quinine fer a spell.

ON AUFIDIUS

Thar ain't no form o' sickness

Thet ever showed itse'f
Inside o' mortal critters,

Enj'yin' mortal breaf.

But what old Doc kin spot it

An' call the thing by name,
Like he was blood-kin to it

An' knowed f'om whar it came.

He's hand-in-glove with fevers,
'N' when he strikes a sprain
He's jest like he was sayin'

"Well, hyere ye are again!"

An' even Death don't feaze him-
He knows it, branch an' roots,
So well ye 'bout 'ud reckon
They both was in cahoots.

An' bein' he's so po'rful,

Ef ever I'm took sick,
'SI say, I want old Doctor,

'N' I want him middlin' quick!

'F my time 's come, naught can save me;
Ef it ain't, why then old Doc

'Ull fetch me round a-hummin'

An' gritty ez a rock.

-EVA WILDER McGlassoN

81

A

On Aufidius

HUM ROUS fellow in a tavern late,

Being drunk and valiant, gets a broken pate;

The surgeon with instruments and skill,

Searches his skull, deeper and deeper still,

To feel his brains, and try if they were sound;

And, as he keeps ado about the wound,

The fellow cries-"Good surgeon, spare your pains,

When I began this brawl I had no brains."

-ACTIUS SANNAZARIUS.