TERRIBLE TRACTORATION,
AND OTHER
POEMS.

[1]

I once stood high on Fortune’s ladder.

Although Dame Fortuna was, by ancient mythologists, represented as a whimsical being, cutting her capers on the periphery of a large wheel, I am justified in accommodating her goddesship with a ladder, by virtue of a figure in rhetoric called Poetica Licentia (anglice) poets’ licentiousness.

[2]

My tintinabulum of rhyming.

“The clock-work tintinabulum of rhyme.”—Cowper.

[3]

I’ll drink Pierian puddle dry.

Pursuant to Mr Pope’s advice;
“Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring.”

[4]

Sent me a bag full of his gas.

This wondrous soul-transporting modification of matter is christened by chymists gaseous oxyd of nitrogen, and, as will be evident, from the following sublime stanzas, and my judicious comments thereon (in which I hold the microscope of criticism to those my peculiar beauties which are not visible to the naked eye of common sense) is a subject worthy the serious attention of the poet and physiologist.

Any “half-formed witling,” as Pope says (Essay on Criticism) “may hammer crude conceptions into a sort of measured nonsense, vulgarly called prose bewitched.” But the daring mortal, who aspires to “build with lofty rhyme” an Ævi Monumentum, before he sets about the mighty enterprise, must be filled with a sort of incomprehensible quiddam of divine inflation. Then, if he can keep clear of Bedlam, and be allowed the use of pen, ink, and paper, every line he scribbles, and every phrase he utters, will be a miracle of sublimity. Thus one Miss Sibyl remained stupid as a barber’s block, till overpowered by the overbearing influence of Phœbus. But when

the frantic gipsy muttered responses at once sublime, prophetic, and unintelligible.

Indeed, this furor mentis, so necessary an ingredient in the composition of the genuine poet, sometimes terminates in real madness, as was unfortunately the case with Collins and Smart: Swift, Johnson, and Cowper, were not without dismal apprehensions of a similar fate. The wight, therefore, who wishes to secure to himself a sublunary immortality by dint of poetizing, and happens not to be poeta nascitur, must, like Doctor Caustic, in the present instance, seek a sort of cow-pock-like substitute for that legitimate rabies, which characterizes the true sons of Apollo.

[5]

Was hous’d in heaven’s high upper story.

Brother Southey then made the important discovery that “the atmosphere of the highest of all possible heavens was composed of this gas.”

Beddoe’s Notice.

[6]

Have said that, in his Epic Poem.

The same poem to which the gentleman alludes in his huge quarto edition of Joan of Arc, in the words following—“Liberal criticism I shall attend to, and I hope to profit by, in the execution of my Madoc, an epic poem on the discovery of America, by that prince, on which I am now engaged.”

As liberal criticism appears to be a great desideratum with this sublime poet, I trust he will gratefully acknowledge the specimens of my liberality towards a worthy brother, which I propose hereafter to exhibit.

[7]

The beldam’s crack’d or Caustic crazy.

Or, it is possible, may it please your worships, that I—I for the matter of that am a little te—te—tipsy, or so.—But as there may perhaps be, as it were, now and then, one of your Right Worshipful Fraternity, who has been in a similar predicament se—se ipse, I hope I shall receive your worships’ permission to stagger on with a jug full of gas in my noddle, at least, through a stanza or two.

[8]

I’m fall’n! fall’n! fall’n! down, flat! flat! flat!

See Dryden’s Feast of Alexander, where one king Darius has a terrible tumble down, beautifully described by half a dozen “fallens.” But I think the Persian monarch did not after all, fall quite so flat as Doctor Caustic.

[9]

And women to hysteric fits.

See the lamentable case of the Lady, page 16th of Dr Beddoes’s pamphlet, who, taking a drop too much of this panacea, fell into hysterical fits, &c.

[10]

Besides a shoal of learned Dutchmen.

Boerhaave, Steno, De Graff, Swammerdam, Zimmerman, cum multis aliis. By the by, gentlemen, this epithet shoal is not always to be taken in a shallow sense; but when applied to such deep fellows, must be considered as noun of multitude, as we say a shoal of herrings.

[11]

My learned friend, Dr Timothy Triangle perusing the manuscript of this my pithy petition, discovered that my description of the modus operandi on the insect as above, compared with the celebrated “veni, vidi, vici,” as a specimen of fine writing, is superior in the direct proportion of four to three; consequently Dr Caustic has advanced one step higher in the climax of sublimity than Julius Cesar.

[12]

Could match OURSELF at second sight.

That your worships may be able to form something like an idea of the wonderful ken of our mental optics, it will be necessary to con with diligence the opinions of Dr Johnson on this subject, as expressed in his tour to the Hebrides. The Doctor there tells us, that though he “never could advance his curiosity to conviction, yet he came away at last, willing to believe.” But we would have all those who anticipate the deriving any advantage from our slight at second seeing, not only willing, but absolutely predetermined to “believe,” positive evidence to the contrary notwithstanding.

[13]

Foreseeing things which never will be.

Yes, gentlemen; among other great and wonderful events which we foretold, but which never have happened, and moreover never will happen, was the restoration of the Jews by the intervention of that renowned pacificator, Buonaparte. We first prophecied, and many men of our cast who had a knack at prying into futurity, echoed our prediction, that the pious emperor of the Gauls would make Jerusalem the head quarters of the Millennium, and under our auspices many a wandering Jew was recruited, and stood in readiness to march at a moment’s warning to take possession of his patrimonial property.

[14]

In our good friend, Sir Joseph’s name.

This was immensely proper, as I propose colonizing these hitherto Terræ Incognitæ, and know of no person in existence, except myself (who am now decrepit with age, and, alas, sadly poverty stricken) whose scientific qualifications, knowledge of the coast, and well known ardent zeal in the science of Tadpolism, so well entitle him to command such important expedition.

[15]

With leg or wing, he kick or jerk it.

Could we command the years of a Nestor, “the indelible ink” of a Lettersom, and the diligence of a Dutch commentator, we should still readily acknowledge that our powers were totally inadequate to the task of eulogising, in proportion to their merits, the philosophical and literary performances of that profound sage, Dr James Anderson, LL. D., F. R. S., Scotland, &c. &c. whose mysterious hints afford a clue by which we have been enabled to add lustre to the present age, by many of our own sublime discoveries and inventions.

In his deep work called “Recreations in Agriculture and Natural History,” the Doctor says, among other things not less marvelous, “The mathematician can demonstrate with the most decisive certainty, that no fly can alight on this globe which we inhabit, without communicating motion to it; and he can ascertain, with the most accurate precision, if so he choose to do” (by the by, this sine qua non part of the sentence is very beautiful, and not at all redundant) “what must be the exact amount of the motion thus produced.” Vol. ii. p. 350.

[16]

Is doctoring off one generation.

“Perhaps no important revolution was ever bloodless. It may be useful in this place to recollect in what the mischief of shedding blood consists. The abuses, which at present exist in all political societies are so enormous, the oppressions which are exercised are so intolerable, the ignorance and vice which they entail so dreadful, that possibly a dispassionate inquirer might decide that, if their annihilation could be purchased by an instant sweeping off of every human being now arrived at maturity, from the face of the earth, the purchase would not be too dear,” &c. &c.—Godwin’s Political Justice.

[17]

Those LL. D.s’ of Lynch’s Law.

Lynch Law, is, we believe, synonymous with mob law, sometimes called club law. By this law summary injustice is executed by an ignorant and furious multitude, who burn and destroy, plunder and murder, without measure and without mercy, the property and persons of anybody and everybody who happen to be obnoxious, or are pointed out as objects entitled to the particular attention of their mobocratic mightinesses. Sometimes the poor individuals who are so unlucky as to fall into the clutches of these horrible human harpies, are subjected to mock trials, in which the accusers enact the parts of law makers, judges and executioners. A man by the name of Lynch, who lives, or has lived, somewhere in the West, was active in this mode of taking cognizance of offences, whence the whole process is called Lynch law. But thereby hangs a tale, which we either do not recollect, or have never heard; and in either case, we shall not, at present, trouble your worships with its recital.

[18]

Call’d craniology of snipes.

It would require an immensity of books, and an eternity of time to describe or even allude to the physiological, craniological, physiognomical, phrenological, &c. &c. &c. theories of Dr Gall, and a multitude of his followers. We shall, therefore, attempt no such thing, but content ourself with the simple assertion, which we will maintain pugnis et calcibus, that, as to the craniology of reptiles and insects we are out of sight above the utmost stretch of whatsoever these superb philosophers could possibly comprehend.

[19]

Vanish before our beauty washes.

Mr Mackenzie, author of five thousand receipts, &c., deserves to be trounced and anathematized for the following vulgar sentence:

“To set off the complexion with all the advantage it can attain, nothing more is necessary than to wash the face with pure water, or if anything farther be occasionally wanted, it is only the addition of a little soap.”

[20]

We transform dowdies into goddesses.

We here quote a passage from a popular writer merely to indicate our utter disapprobation of the author and of his sentiments:

“The solicitude of parents, especially of mothers to make their daughters fine ladies is truly ridiculous. How often soever the poor child has occasion to look at anything below the parallel of the horizon, and a little relax the muscles of the neck, it can hardly ever escape the notice of her mamma or her governess, and she is bid with more than common poignancy of expression, to hold up her head, perhaps more than a thousand times in a day. If one of her shoulders should be thought to rise but an hair’s breadth higher than the other, she is immediately bound and braced, twisted and screwed, in a most unmerciful manner, and tortured almost to death, in order to correct the supposed irregularity. And lest the dear creature, in the natural play and free use of her limbs, should contract any ungenteel habits, the dancing master must be called in at least three times a week to put every part of the body into its due place and attitude, and teach her to sit, stand and walk according to the exact rules of his art, which, to be sure, must infinitely exceed all the simplicity of untutored nature. Should the least pimple appear on any part of the face, or what is still more alarming, should the milk-maid’s flush begin to betray itself in the color of the cheeks, all possible means must be used, physic and diet must do their part, nay, health itself must be endangered or destroyed to suppress the vulgar complexion.

“Health and beauty have been frequently destroyed by a solicitous care to preserve them, deformity induced, and a thousand ill habits contracted by the very means that were intended to prevent them.”—Ash’s Sentiments on Education.

[21]

See additional note No. 1, at the end of the volume.

[22]

They might as well have none at all.

The process by which this fabrication is effected is copied from Nature; and her manipulations in similar performances have been thus described in some of our heretofore publications:

[23]

Horace says, dulce est desipere.

The stanza with which this line commences, is a liberal, but so far as respects meaning, a faithful translation of the famous maxim, Dulce est desipere in loco.—Horace L. iv. C. 12.

[24]

Is made of any kind of wood.

The hint for this improvement was derived from an article in the American Farmer, from which the following is extracted:

“A few weeks since, two of the members of the United Society of Shakers, at Lebanon, N. Y., were at our office. They informed us that they had tried an experiment in feeding hogs with saw dust, produced in their button and other wooden ware factory, by mixing with the usual food, in the proportion of one third; that is, two parts of the usual food and one part of saw dust; and that the hogs thrive full as well as when fed in the usual way. From their experiments they are satisfied that the saw-dust was digested by the animals, was nutritious, and answered in all respects the purposes of the usual food.”

[25]

Illumed as one would light a candle.

In my younger days, I lived on terms of intimacy with Doctor Franklin, highly honorable to both parties, as it showed we were both men of discernment in choosing each a great man for his friend.

In a letter from that venerable sage, afterwards printed (See Franklin’s Works, p. 115, vol. ii. third edition) he told me that toads buried in sand, shut up in hollow trees, &c. would live forever, as it were; and, among other things, informed me of certain curious facts about flies, which I will relate in his own words. “I have seen an instance of common flies preserved in a manner somewhat similar. They had been drowned in Madeira wine, apparently about the time when it was bottled in Virginia, to be sent to London. At the opening of one of the bottles, at the house of a friend where I was, three drowned flies fell into the first glass which was filled. Having heard it remarked that drowned flies were capable of being revived by the rays of the sun, I proposed making the experiment upon these. They were therefore exposed to the sun upon a sieve, which had been employed to strain them out of the wine. In less than three hours two of them began by degrees to recover life. They commenced by some convulsive motions of the thighs, and at length they raised themselves upon their legs, wiped their eyes with their fore feet, beat and brushed their wings with their hind feet, and soon after began to fly, finding themselves in Old England, without knowing how they came thither. The third continued lifeless until sun-set, when, losing all hopes of him, he was thrown away.

“I wish it were possible, from this instance, to invent a method of embalming drowned persons, in such a manner that they might be recalled to life, at any period, however distant; for having a very ardent desire to see and observe the state of America a hundred years hence, I should prefer to an ordinary death, the being immersed in a cask of Madeira wine, with a few friends, until that time, then to be recalled to life by the solar warmth of my dear country. But since, in all probability, we live in an age too early, and too near the infancy of science, to see such an art brought, in our time, to perfection, I must, for the present, content myself with the treat which you are so kind as to promise me, of the resurrection of a fowl or turkey cock.”

[26]

To healthier action than before.

I do not arrogate to myself the whole merit of this noble invention. Dr Price and Mr Godwin, in divers elaborate works, especially the latter, in his Political Justice, suggested some ideas which set my ingenuity in such a ferment, that I could not rest quietly till I had brewed a sublime treatise on the best mode of pulling down, repairing, and rebuilding decayed and worn out animal machines.

I shall not attempt, in this place, to oblige your worships with anything like a table of the contents of this judicious and profound performance. I will, however, gratify your curiosity so far as to glance cursorily at a few of the leading topics therein discussed and illustrated, and slightly mention some of the immense advantages which will be the result of this discovery.

In the first place, I make it apparent, by a long series of experiments and scientific deductions, drawn therefrom, that it is very practicable to enlighten the mind of a stupid fellow, by battering, boring, or pulling his body to pieces.—Mr poet Waller’s authority is here to my purpose, who tells us, that

Mr Gray, likewise, in his Hymn to Adversity, requests that “Daughter of Jove” to impose gently her “iron hand,” and trouble him a little with her “torturing hour,” although he appears disposed to avoid, if possible, her more dismal accompaniments, such as her “Gorgonic frown,” and the “funereal cry of horror.”

The Spaniards, under Cortes and Pizarro, managed much in the same way, and enlightened the natives of the mighty empires of Peru and Mexico in the great truths of Christianity, by killing a part, reducing the remainder to a state of servitude, and battering their souls’ cottages at their leisure. This process is in part expressed in a poetical epistle, which I received not long since from my correspondent settled at Terra del Fuego, in South America, who thus expresses the conduct of some of his acquaintance, in converting the aborigines to Christianity.

I have read of a great mathematician, who was uncommonly stupid till about the age of twenty, when he accidentally pitched head first into a deep Well, fractured his skull, and it became necessary to trepan him. After the operation it was immediately evident that his wit was much improved, and he soon became a prodigy of intellect. Whether this alteration was caused by “new light let in through chinks,” the trapanning chisel had made, or whether the texture and position of the brain were materially changed for the better in consequence of the jar and contusion of the fall, I shall leave to some future Lavater, or any other gentleman, who can gauge the capacity of a statesman, or a barrel of porter, with equal facility, to determine.

2d. I proceed to demonstrate, that man being, as our most enlightened modern philosophers allow, jumbled together by mere chance (a blind; capricious goddess, who, half her time, does not know what she is about) it is extremely easy to understand the principles of his texture; because the mechanism of his frame is less intricate than that of a common spit jack. Consequently, a Solomon or a Brodum can mend this machine when deranged, as Well as a Harvey, a Sydenham, or a Mead.

3d. I proceed to prove, from analogy, with what facility this machine may be disjointed, pulled to pieces, and again botched together. My friend Mahomet had his heart taken out, a drop of black blood expressed therefrom, and went about his common concerns next day as well as ever. So when a sighing swain is taken desperately in love, he may lose all his insides without any Very serious inconvenience. This I can attest from sad experience, as, about forty years since, I was terribly in for’t, with a sweet little sprig of divinity, whose elbow was ever her most prominent feature, whenever I had the audacity to attempt to approximate the shrine of her Goddesship.

4th. The important advantages, which will undoubtedly arise from this invention, are almost too obvious to require explanation. I shall, however, advert to a few.

By taking the animal machine to pieces, you may divest it of such particles as clog its wheels, and render its motions less perfect. A decayed, worn-out gallant may have its parts separated, thoroughly burnished, botched together, and rendered as bright as a new-coined silver sixpence. Thus my venerable Piccadilly friend, who, as Darwin expresses it, sometimes “clasps a beauty in Platonic arms;” if he should, fifty years hence, perceive that the mechanism of his frame is rather the worse for wear, may come to Dr Caustic, and be rebuilt into as fine a young buck as any in Christendom.

5th. Hereditary diseases may be thus culled from the constitution, and gouty and other deleterious particles separated from those which are sound and healthful.

Pride may be picked from the composition of an upstart mushroom of a nobleman, impudence from a quack, knavery from a lawyer, moroseness from a methodist, testiness from an old bachelor, peevishness from an old maid; in short, mankind altered from what they are to what they ought to be, by a method at once cheap, practicable, easy and expeditious.

The only difficulty which has ever opposed itself to my carrying this sublime invention to the highest possible pitch of perfection, has been the almost utter impossibility of procuring any man, woman, or child, who is willing to become the subject of operation. Now if either of your worships would loan me his carcase to be picked to pieces, and again botched together in the manner above stated, provided the experiment should not fully succeed, I will engage to pay all the damages thereby accruing to community, out of one tenth part of the profits of this publication.

[27]

The gods of old folks could make young ones.

This passage, with a condensation of thought and felicity of expression peculiar to myself, I have thus happily hit into English.

[28]

In mimic earthquakes, rain, and thunder!

Chymistry furnishes us with a method of manufacturing artificial earthquakes, which will have all the great effects of those that are natural. The old-fashioned receipt for an earthquake, however, of iron filings and sulphur mixed in certain proportions and immersed in the earth, I shall not take the trouble to state to your worships; as most of you have, perhaps, read Mr Martin’s Philosophy nearly half through. But my plan is to make such an earthquake as no mortal, except Dr Darwin and myself, ever supposed possible. The former gentleman made shift to explode the moon from the southern hemisphere of our earth, and I propose to forward other moons by artificial earthquakes of my own invention, from the northern hemisphere. I will give your worships a specimen of Dr Darwin’s moon-producing earthquake, from “Botanic Garden,” Canto I.

No man will say in this case,—

The reaction, at the moment of explosion, of that mass of matter which now composes our moon, is the cause of the obliquity of the polar axis to the poles of the ecliptic, according to Dr Darwin; though Milton says,

Whether an explosion similar to that, so beautifully described by Dr Darwin, from the north side of the equator, would not set all right, and a new era be announced, which will be, like that of old, when

is a problem worth the attention of our modern philosophers. But at any rate, I, Dr Caustic, will positively try the experiment.

[29]

E’en fairly knock the man in the moon down!

This notable exploit I think to be a very great improvement on electrical experiments made by a number of renowned French and English philosophers. See Priestly’s History of Electricity, page 94.

[30]

We took like macaroni snuff.

Dr Darwin alludes to this wonderful performance in the following superb lines:

[31]

And if Britannia interferes.

That Great Britain, not content with domineering on the surface, contemplates the colonizing of the depths of the ocean, is evident from the following lines, by Dr Darwin:

But be it known by these presents to Britannia’s ladyship, that all that part of the ocean, which lies between the centre of gravity and six feet of the surface, including whatsoever salt water touches or rests upon, belongs to Doctor Caustic, by the rights of discovery and pre-occupation.

[32]

And if the theory of Babbage, &c.

Charles Babbage, Esq. A. M., Lucasian Professor of Mathematics in the University of Cambridge, [Eng.] and member of several academies, has written and published a work On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, which furnished that impulse to our Organ of Constructiveness which eventuated in the accomplishment of the solid gas manufactory above alluded to.

“In Iceland the sources of heat [to wit, hot springs, volcanoes, &c.] and their proximity seem almost to point out the future destiny of that island. The use of its glaciers may enable its inhabitants to liquefy the gases with the least expenditure of mechanical force; and the heat of its volcanoes may supply the power necessary for their condensation. Thus, in a future age, power may become the staple commodity of the Icelanders, and of the inhabitants of other volcanic districts; and possibly the very process by which they will procure this article of exchange for the luxuries of happier climates, may, in some measure tame, the tremendous element which occasionally devastates this province.”

By our improvement, after the gases are condensed into a liquid, they are made solid by the total abstraction therefrom of every particle of caloric, insomuch that a thermometer, of our invention, with its bulb in a ball of gas, indicated 999 degrees below 0 of Fahrenheit.

[33]

He wanted science to go through it.

Monsieur Citizen Volney, a sort of minor doctor Caustic, published a circular letter, requesting the co-operation of men of similar views and intellects with his own, to make observations on the course and velocity of the winds, the times of their occurrence, &c. in different parts of the globe. The results of these observations he wished might be forwarded to him at Paris, that he might therefrom be able to complete a theory, which he had partly formed for calculating the tides and currents of the atmosphere, with as much precision as those of the ocean are now predicted.

Dr Franklin’s theories relative to this subject also deserve the meed of metrical immortality. His tropical hurricanes, caused by a whirling precipitance of cold air from the upper to the lower region of the atmosphere are very fine phenomena. His north east storms, which, on our continent, begin their operations at the south west, in consequence of some extra rarefaction of air somewhere on or about the isthmus of Darien, deserve a minute inspection. The ascent of rarefied air at the equator, which makes its way to the poles, and visits us in the form of a frigorific north-wester, as explained by Dr Darwin, requires your worship’s high consideration. But we do not believe it possible by a single impulse to project all this philosophy into your right worshipful’s pericrania. You will, therefore, please wait till we have leisure for the operation.

[34]

And would not let him “vomit air.”

This terrible bear is likewise a camelion, and also a dragon. But here you have him—

And again in prose.

“Though the immediate cause of the destruction or reproduction of great masses of air, at certain times when the wind changes from north to south, or from south to north, cannot yet be ascertained; yet as there appears greater difficulty in accounting for this change of wind from any other known causes, we may still suspect that there exists in the arctic and antarctic circles, a BEAR or DRAGON, yet unknown to philosophers, which, at times, suddenly drinks up, and at other times as suddenly vomits out, one fifteenth part of the atmosphere: and hope that this or some future age will learn how to govern and domesticate a monster which might be rendered of such important service to mankind”!!!

Botanic Garden. Note XXXIII.

[35]

Or stem a hurricane with ease.

“Many schemes” (it is said in Rees’s Cyclopædia, article Aerostation) “have been proposed for directing the horizontal motion of balloons. Some have thought of annexing sails to a balloon, in order to give it the advantage of the wind; but to this proposal it has been objected, that as the aerostatic machines are at rest with respect to the air that surrounds them, they feel no wind, and consequently can derive no benefit from the sails.” None but a conjurer, however, could have made that discovery. But Dr Rees says further, that “An ingenious writer observes, that the case of vessels at sea is quite different from that of balloons; because that the former move with a velocity incomparably less than that of the wind impelling them, on account of the resistance of the water,” &c. This ingenious writer must have had a new edition of Friar Bacon’s head on his shoulders.

Our mode of steering a balloon is an improvement on the invention of Professor Danzel, which is thus described by Dr Rees. “Professor Danzel has constructed two cylinders, or axles, to the ends of which are fixed, in the form of a cross, four sails or oars, moveable at the point of their insertion in the cylinder, in such a manner, that when made to move round by means of a handle, the eight oars, like the cogs of a water mill wheel, present, successively, sometimes their flat side and sometimes their edge,” &c.

It is very possible that you may have heard of some of our American mechanical geniuses, who have sometimes come very nigh to the art of navigating boats against the stream by the force of the current. But our invention is very materially different from that. We manage much like a crab or lobster that paddles himself forward under water, and proceeds as well as if he actually carried sail.

[36]

And its contagion is outrageous.

Some people, who appear to be fond of an opportunity of spoiling a beautiful theory, have produced against contagion the following arguments, and thereby very much perplexed a simple subject which ought to have been decided solely by the ipse dixit of some famous personage of the faculty.

1. The disorder is propagated more rapidly than could be possible on the theory of contagion; as it spreads over a large city quicker than the small pox would pervade a single alley.

2. It assimilates to itself all other diseases, and forces them to wear its livery; which never is the case in contagious disorders.

3. It is destroyed by frost; but frost increases the activity of contagion.

4. It is an endemic, and must have its own local atmosphere, beyond whose limits it cannot be communicated. Thus the attendants of the sick in country hospitals are never known to be infected.

These, and fifty other arguments of a similar nature, I overturn by the weight of the authority of Dr Mead and other great men, which I have found to be a concise and inclusive way of stopping the mouths of my opponents.

[37]

By laws of chemical affinity;

Many an elaborate argument, founded on the above philosophical proposition has been bandied about in periodical prints and journals, during sundry desperate disputes relative to the origin of the American plague. Madrid and Edinburgh, it is affirmed, are rendered healthy by a want of cleanliness, which is proverbial. This sound reasoning is made the basis of our judicious prescriptions which adorn this and several consecutive stanzas.

[38]

Paulo majora nunc canamus.

[39]

We’ll turn out full moons by the hundred.

I do not think that one in forty of your worships has ever read the “Theory of the Earth,” as first produced by James Hutton, M. D., F. R. S., &c. &c. and thereafter much improved by professor Playfair. As it would, however, be highly commendable for gentlemen of your honorable profession not to rest with a superficial view of the great operations of nature, I will accompany you as far as the centre of gravity, in a journey of observation, for investigating the astonishing magazines of burning materials which Dr Hutton and professor Playfair have furnished us for the execution of our stupendous project.

1. You will obligingly take it for granted, or run the risk of spoiling the Huttonian Theory, that the centre of the globe is a stupendous furnace, a million times hotter than that of Nebuchadnezzar. That this same heat, although it never amounts to a blaze, and wastes no fuel, is sufficiently elastic to raise the continents from the bottom of the main.—That having once raised or blown them up, as it were, like a bladder, it is very careful not to let them down again, because as we shall see by and by, they must all be “disintegrated,” alias washed into the ocean.

2. Moreover, Dr Hutton’s followers will thank you to suppose that all this matter, raised as aforesaid, consisted originally of unstratified rocks, which, though they are properly called primitive as the most ancient of the whole family of rocks, yet they are in fact nothing better than the scrapings or “disintegrations” of primal continents which existed before the commencement of the last edition of the earth.

3. You will please to believe that all calcareous matters are formed from the detritus of the primitive rocks, delivered by rivers into the sea, and there, after having been modified by central heat, protruded above water as before mentioned.

4. You will likewise be convinced that no metal, mineral, or lapidose substance, can possibly be formed except at the bottom of the ocean, in the laboratory of Dr Hutton.[C]

5. That although some foolish people have supposed that the sea has been subsiding for centuries, yet, as we know that the continents are crumbling into the ocean, you will conclude that we shall at length find all our dry land under water, and the sea increased in proportion to the square feet of earth deposited under its surface.

6. That it is evident that this central heat, having raised its continents, and put proper supporters under them, will go to work in due time, and raise new continents from the bottom of the ocean. Thus the area of Dr Hutton’s centre will be enlarged, till the earth and moon will come in contact, if our plan hereafter mentioned should not check such progression. But we forbear, lest when it is ascertained that “the present continents are all going to decay and their materials descending into the ocean,” it may cause some disagreeable sensations among our friends, who are speculators in American lands, whose property, it seems, according to Dr Hutton’s theory, is about to take French leave of its worthy proprietors.

When you have thoroughly saturated your faculties with this theory, we will oblige you with a fresh solution from Dr Darwin, compounded as follows:

“The variation of the compass can only be accounted for by supposing the central parts of the earth to consist of a fluid mass, and that part of this fluid is iron, which requiring a greater degree of heat to bring it into fusion than glass or other metals, remains a solid ore. The vis inertiæ of this fluid mass with the iron in it occasions it to perform fewer revolutions than the crust of solid earth over it; and thus it is gradually left behind, and the place where the floating iron resides, is pointed to by the direct or retrograde motion of the magnetic needle.”

[40]

Of bellows made of Franklin’s air.

In the first paper of the third volume of Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, you will find certain “Conjectures concerning the formation of the earth,” &c. in a letter from Dr B. Franklin, to the abbe Soulavie; which we would prescribe as tonics to Hutton’s system. The American sage informs us, that in the course of some observations in Derbyshire, in England, he “imagined that the internal part (of the earth) might be a fluid more dense, and of greater specific gravity than any of the solids we are acquainted with; which, therefore, might swim in or upon that fluid. Thus the surface of the globe would be a shell, capable of being broken and disordered by any violent movements of the fluid on which it rested. And as air has been compressed by art so as to be twice as dense as water, in which case, if such air and water could be contained in a strong glass vessel, the air would be seen to take the lowest place, and the water to float above and upon it;[D] and as we know not yet the degree of density to which air may be compressed; and M. Amontons calculated, that its density increasing as it approached the centre in the same proportion as above the surface, it would at the depth of—leagues be heavier than gold, possibly the dense fluid occupying the internal parts of the globe might be air compressed. And as the force of expansion in dense air, when heated, is in proportion to its density; this central air might afford another agent to move the surface, as well as be of use in keeping alive the subterraneous fires; though, as you observe, the sudden rarefication of water coming into contact with those fires may also be an agent sufficiently strong for that purpose, when acting between the incumbent earth and the fluid on which it rests.

“If one might indulge imagination in supposing how such a globe was formed, I should conceive, that all the elements in separate particles being originally mixed in confusion, and occupying a great space, they would, as soon as the Almighty fiat ordained gravity or the mutual attraction of certain parts and the mutual repulsion of other parts to exist, all move towards their common centre: That the air being a fluid whose parts repel each other, though drawn to the common centre by their gravity, would be densest towards the centre and rarer as more remote; consequently all matters lighter than the central part of that air and immersed in it, would recede from the centre and rise till they arrived at that region of the air which was of the same specific gravity with themselves, where they would rest; while other matter, mixed with the lighter air would descend, and the two meeting would form the shell of the first earth, leaving the upper atmosphere nearly clear.[E] The original movement of the parts towards their common centre, would naturally form a whirl there, which would continue in the turning of the new formed globe upon its axis, and the greatest diameter of the shell would be in its equator. If by any accident afterwards, the axis should be changed,” [viz. by the impinging of a Buffon’s comet’s tail or the delivery of a Darwin’s moon] “the dense internal fluid by altering its form must burst the shell and throw all its substance into the confusion in which we find it!” There’s an air gun for your worships!

Now, if we did not possess a particular partiality for the sage who formed this system, we should probably break up his Eolian cave, even at the risk of creating half a hundred hurricanes. For should we open a vent as large as a needle’s point into this magazine of compressed air, you would instantly be assailed by “another guess whistling”[F] than was the tempest tost Trojan fleet when

[41]

Destroy good doctor Burnet’s crust.

We should be able to make much more rapid progress in our sublime flights of poetry, were we not under the necessity of dismounting from our Pegasus every ten paces, in order to give your worships a heist, and thus enable your ponderosities, like Mr Pope’s “slugs,” to keep up with us. It is a thousand to one if any one of your college has ever heard of Dr Burnet, of earth-manufacturing memory. But it is absolutely necessary that you should know something of Dr Burnet’s theory before you can comprehend the stanza to which this note has reference. You will, therefore, shut up this, my volume, and per fas aut nefas obtain possession of Dr Burnet’s theory of the earth’s formation; and when you have diligently drudged through that treatise, we will again take you in tow, and permit you to accompany us, but non passibus equis, till our muse salutes you with procul! O procul! &c.

[42]

By Parker’s cement we’ll endeavor.

A composition has been invented by a Mr Parker, which bids fair to become one of the most important discoveries which has signalized the present century. The gentleman has compounded a cement or mortar, which, by the mere action of the air, assumes in a week or two the durability and consistence of the hardest marble and the firmest stone, and may be applied to all the purposes to which the strongest grained freestone is usually applied. Bridges, aqueducts, houses, and we suppose pavements and roads, can be as well constructed of this material as of the ordinary matters used in their composition. The ornaments and articles usually made of marble can also be made of the same materials, as it admits of a high polish, is incalculably cheaper, just as durable, much lighter, and more easily worked. It is not unlikely, that the waters of the Croton may be brought to New York in pipes and aqueducts made of this article, as it would be so much more economical than if transported thither in a canal of masonry, besides that the new canal is impervious, never leaks, and consequently no expenses for repairing would be ever incurred. There is not an article used in household matters, or for public purposes that has formerly been made of stone, but admits of the substitution of this cheaper and lighter article; and we learn that the corporation have inspected the manufacture, and are impressed with a proper sense of its importance and applicability to civic purposes.—N. Y. Mirror.

[43]

The foolish trash of Isaac Newton.

See Studies of Nature, by St Pierre, in which that scheming philosopher has, with wonderful adroitness, swept away the cobweb calculations of one Isaac Newton. Indeed, I never much admired the writings of the last mentioned gentleman, for the substantial reasons following.

In the first place, the inside of a man’s noddle must be better furnished than that of St Pierre, or he will never be able to comprehend them.

Secondly, it would be impossible to manufacture a system, like that of St Pierre, accounting for the various phenomena of nature, in a new and simple method, if one were obliged to proceed, like Newton, in his Principia, in a dull, plodding, mathematical manner, and prove, or even render probable, the things he asserts. But by taking some facts for granted, without proof, omitting to mention such as militate against a favorite theory, we may, with great facility, erect a splendid edifice of “airy nothings,” founded on hypotheses without foundation.

The said Isaac had taken it into his head that the earth’s equatorial was longer than its polar diameter. This, he surmised from the circumstance of a pendulum vibrating slower near the equator than near the pole, and from finding that the centrifugal force of the earth would not fully account for the difference between the time of the vibrations at Cayenne and at Paris.

This, with other reasons equally plausible, led him to suppose that the earth was flattened near the poles, in the form of an oblate spheroid, and that a degree of latitude would, of consequence, be greater near the pole than at the equator. Actual admeasurement coincided with that conclusion.

The abbe St Pierre, however, possessing a most laudable ambition to manufacture tides from polar ices, and thus to overturn Sir Isaac’s theory relative to the moon’s influence in producing those phenomena, and finding it somewhat convenient for that purpose to place his poles at a greater distance from the centre of gravity than the equator, accordingly took that liberty. He likewise had another substantial reason therefor. Unless his polar diameter was longer than his equatorial, the tides, being caused by the fusion of polar ices, must flow up hill.

He therefore drew a beautiful diagram with which a triangle would (according to the scheme of the author of The Loves of the Triangles, improved from Dr Darwin’s Loves of the Plants) certainly fall in love at first sight. (See page xxxiv. Pref. Studies of Nature.) In displaying his geometrical skill in this diagram, however, he took care to forget that there was some little difference between an oblong and an oblate spheroid.—That flattening the earth’s surface, either in a direction perpendicular or parallel to the poles, would increase the length of a degree of latitude by decreasing the earth’s convexity. That neither an oblate, nor an oblong spheroid was quite so spherical as a perfect sphere. This was very proper, because such facts would have been conclusive against his new Theory of the Tides.

[44]

To make a clever sort of plough.

If you wish, gentlemen, to know anything further relative to this instinctive plough, you will take the trouble to consult Mr Godwin’s Political Justice, in which you will find almost as many sublime and practicable schemes for meliorating the condition of man, as in this very erudite work of my own. Let it not be inferred from my not enlarging upon the present and other schemes of this philosopher, that I would regard him as one whit inferior to any other modern philosopher existing, not even excepting his friend Holcroft; but the necessity of expatiating on the redundancy of Mr Godwin’s merits, is totally precluded by the unbounded fame which his chaste productions have at length acquired among the virtuous and respectable classes in community.

[45]

They show us how to live for ever.

The learned Dr Price, in his Tracts on Civil Liberty, assures us that such sublime discoveries will be hereafter made by men of science (meaning such as Dr Caustic) that it will be possible to cure the disease of old age, give man a perpetual sublunary existence, and introduce the millenium, by natural causes.

[46]

His new exploded solar system.

This sublime philosopher has been most atrociously squibbed in the following performance, which I can assure you, gentlemen, is not mine; and, if I could meet with the author, I would teach him better than to bespatter my favorite with the filth of his obloquy.

“Lines on a certain philosopher, who maintains that all continents and islands were thrown from the sea by volcanoes; and that all animal life originally sprung from the exuviæ of fishes. His family arms are three scallop shells, and his motto, “Omnia e Conchis.”

[47]

First peer’d our continent through and through.

Citizen Volney made a very curious, simple, and convenient division of the “Interior Structure” of North America, from certain specimens of mineral substances, collected by this industrious pedestrian in a tour of observation through the United States. Notwithstanding the immense extent of territory which has come under citizen Volney’s cognizance, and the short time which he did us the honor to reside and peregrinate among us, we find that he was able to parcel our continent into different interior departments, with as much precision as Buonaparte showed in marking the different provinces of his empire. He gives us “The granite region, the grit or sandstone region, the calcareous or limestone region,” &c. &c.

Now this division is the more ingenious, because it possesses no foundation in nature; and therefore shows a wonderful invention in its author. It happens, luckily for this fine theory, that granite is found in wonderful abundance in the limestone region, and that throughout the continent, in defiance of Mr Volney, we find that nature has jumbled all his “regions” together. Nature, having made some confusion in this way, has the more need of the assistance of modern philosophy to aid her defective operations.

[48]

Of graduated French morality.

This gentleman published in America a small pamphlet, entitled, The Law of Nature, or Principles or Morality, deduced from the Physical Constitution of Mankind and the Universe. In this he tells us, “It is high time to prove that morality is a physical and geometrical science, and as such, susceptible, like the rest, of calculation and mathematical demonstration.”

My friend, doctor Timothy Triangle, is much such another philosopher; but has surpassed the Frenchman in the extent of his views, and made systems which were entirely out of the reach of Mr Volney’s intellect. Among others, was a scale of national character. By this, the latitude and longitude of a place being given, and a sort of tare and tret allowance made for adventitious circumstances, he could ascertain the character of its inhabitants. The latitude of Paris, he affirmed, was that of perfectibility made perfect, and most lucidly manifested in the person of the Liberty-loving Emperor. Rise to the equator, or recede to the pole from that parallel, and human nature dwindles in arithmetical progression.

This gentleman was a great admirer of the principles of the French revolution, and made out, mathematically, how much blood, horror, and devastation would be necessary to give that predominance to France and French principles, which would terminate in philosophy’s millennium.

Dr Triangle likewise made geometrical scales of morality; which were not very essentially different from the principles of Volney. These scales were adapted accurately to the interest, feelings, passions, and prepossessions of the persons for whom they were intended, and so elastic that they would stretch to suit any case, and authorize any action which could be conceived or perpetrated.

[49]

By Perkins’s Metallic Practice.

Here comes the Hydra, which you Herculean gentlemen are requested to destroy; but the means, by which this great end is to be accomplished, will be fully pointed out in the succeeding cantos.

[50]

[51]

But I’m a man so meek and humble.

If your worships have ever read the Eneid of one Virgil (which though possible is not very probable, as physicians in general rarely make themselves “mad,” by “too much learning”) you will perceive a classical beauty in the commencement of this canto, which would escape the observation of the “ignobile vulgus.” As I wish, however, that you might be able to relish some of the most obvious beauties of this, my most exquisite poetical production, you will hire some schoolmaster to show you how happily we have imitated the “At regina gravi” of Virgil, and the “But now t’ observe romantic method” of Butler.

[52]

Though starving is a serious matter!

Many a worthy London alderman will most feelingly sigh a dolorous response to this pathetic complaint.

[53]

We all must be in one sad mess.

The sound is here a most correct echo to the sense; like the

of Homer; the

of Virgil; the

of Butler;

of Pope, &c. Indeed, gentlemen, I shall almost be tempted to pronounce that person a sorry sort of a simpleton, who does not see, or seem to see, the lengthened visage and hanging lip of our learned Esculapian Fraternity, depicted with the phiz-hitting pencil of a Hogarth, in these eight beautiful and appropriate monosyllables.

[54]

Behold a rising Institution.

The builders of this second edition of the tower of Babel must be confounded; and that they will be, most certainly, provided the measures herein after recommended, be fully and manfully carried into effect. But as it may be safest to reconnoitre somewhat before we begin the attack, we will introduce you into the midst of the enemy’s encampment, in an additional note at the end of our poem.

[55]

Perkins supported by Aldini!

These two wonder-working wizards are said to effect their necromantic manœuvres by the application of similar principles to the animal machine. But the latter does not, in so great a degree, infringe on our privileges, for he begins where we leave off; that is, after the patient is dead; whereas Perkins, by his pretended easy and expeditious mode of curing those who ought to depend solely on “death and the doctor,” is a more formidable foe to our profession. See additional note, No. 3.

[56]

To raise a dead dog he was able.

“Dr Aldini, now in London, lately exhibited, at the house of Mr Hunter, some curious experiments on the body of a dog newly killed, by which the company then present were exceedingly astonished at the powers of Galvanism. The head of the animal was cut off. The head and the body were put beside each other on a table, previously rubbed with a solution of Ammonia. Two wires, communicating with the Galvanic trough, were then applied, the one in the ear, the other at the anus of the dead animal. No sooner had those applications been made, than both head and body were thrown into the most animated muscular motions. The body started up with a movement, by which it passed over the side of the table. The head equally moved, its lips and teeth grinning most violently!” Vide the Morning Post of January 6th, 1803.

[57]

With two legs up, and two legs down.

Your worships will perceive that I have detailed some particulars relative to this famous experiment, which were omitted in the above statement from the Morning Post. But should any gentleman among you presume to intimate that I have stated one syllable which is not strictly and literally true, I shall embrace the fashionable mode of resenting the affront. I have two pistols in my garret. Let him who dares dispute Dr Caustic take his choice. Then, unless

I will make it apparent that I am a man of honor, as well as veracity.

[58]

He made it bellow like a Stentor!

“Some curious Galvanic experiments were made on Friday last, by professor Aldini, in doctor Pearson’s lecture room. They were instituted in the presence of his excellency, the ambassador of France, general Andreossi, lord Pelham, the duke of Roxburgh, lord Castlereagh, lord Hervey, the Hon. Mr Upton, &c. The head of an ox, recently decapitated, exhibited astonishing effects; for the tongue being drawn out by a hook fixed into it, on applying the exciters, in spite of the strength of the assistant, was retracted, so as to detach itself, by tearing itself from the hook; at the same time, a loud noise issued from the mouth, attended by violent contortions of the whole head and eyes.” See Morning Post of February 16th, 1803.

[59]

Rogues that were hung once, at Old Bailey!

“The body of Forster, who was executed on Monday last, for murder, was conveyed to a house not far distant, where it was subjected to the Galvanic process, by professor Aldini, under the inspection of Mr Keate, Mr Carpue, and several other professional gentlemen. M. Aldini, who is the nephew of the discoverer of this most interesting science, showed the eminent and superior powers of Galvanism to be far beyond any other stimulant in nature. On the first application of the process to the face, the jaw of the deceased criminal began to quiver; and the adjoining muscles were horribly contorted, and one eye was actually opened. In the subsequent part of the process, the right hand was raised and CLENCHED, and the legs and thighs were set in motion.

“It appeared to the uninformed part of the by-standers, as if the wretched man was on the eve of being restored to life. This, however, was impossible; as several of his friends, who were near the scaffold, had violently pulled his legs, in order to put a more speedy termination to his sufferings.” Vide the Morning Post of January 22, 1803.

It is to be hoped, in case this Mr Professor undertakes any future operations of this nature, that some more choleric dead man will not only clench his fist like Forster, but convince him, by dint of pugilistic demonstration, that he is not to disturb with impunity those who ought to be at “rest from their labors.”

[60]

He sees their worships plague old Francis.

Dr Francis Anthony. The author of the Biographia Britannica relates a pitiful tale respecting the persecutions suffered by this obstinate old schismatic. “He was,” says that writer, “a very learned physician and chemist, the son of an eminent goldsmith in London. Was born April 16th, 1550. In 1569, he was sent to the university of Cambridge; in 1574, took the degree of A. M. &c. &c. He began soon after his arrival (in London) to publish to the world the effects of his chemical studies. But not having taken the necessary precaution of addressing himself to the College of Physicians for their license, he fell under their displeasure; and being some time in the year 1600 summoned before the president and censors, he confessed that he had practised physic in London for six months, and had cured twenty persons or more of several diseases.” [A most atrocious crime! I trust very few if any of your worships would be justified in confessing or pleading guilty to a similar indictment.] “About one month after, he was committed to the Counter prison, and fined in the sum of five pounds propter illicitam praxim—that is, for prescribing against the statutes of the college: but upon his application to the chief justice, he was set at liberty, which gave so great an umbrage, that the president and one of the censors waited on the chief justice to request his favor in preserving the college privileges: upon which Anthony submitted and promised to pay his fine, and was forbidden practice. He was soon after accused again for practising physic, and upon his own confession was fined another five pounds, which fine, on his refusing to pay, was increased to twenty pounds, and he was sentenced to be committed to prison till he had paid it. Nor was the college satisfied with this, but commenced a suit at law against him, in the name of the queen and college, in which they prevailed, and had judgment against him. It appears that the learned society thought him ignorant; but there were others of a different opinion, since, after all these censures, and being tossed about from prison to prison, he became doctor of physic in our own universities!”

This is the substance of the proceedings of our ancestors against the arch-heretic; from which we learn the absolute necessity of a still more rigorous prosecution of those disturbers of society, who have the impudence to cure their patients without your License. Had this old fellow been hung, or “burnt off,” as he deserved, the business would have been finished at once, and none would afterwards have dared ever to call in question your supremacy!

[61]

A delectable imitation of Dr Darwin’s delightful pair of lines—

To prevent any post obit disputes among those who may hereafter write comments on this sublime passage, I have thought it advisable to designate the species of the dog which howls so horridly on this great occasion.

[62]

’Tis Radcliffe’s sullen sprite now rising.

This shows Pluto to be a god of correct calculation. Had he sent one of your water-gruel ghosts, it is a thousand to one if your worships would have paid the least deference to the mandates of his sooty highness.

[63]

Or Monk-y Lewis’ Spanish Spectre!

I would have no impudent slanderer insinuate that I mean to bestow on the right honorable M. G. Lewis, M. P. any opprobrious epithet. No, gentlemen, I did not say monkey. The term which I use is an adjective, legitimately coined from the substantive Monk; and I affix it to this gentleman’s name as an honorary appellation, to which he is entitled, for having written that celebrated romance called The Monk. As to the Spanish Spectre, you will please to consult the romance aforesaid, and you will find a most horrible ballad, by which it appears that a certain Miss Imogene was carried off on her bridal night, if I mistake not, by the ghost of one Don Alonzo, to whom she had been betrothed, but proved false hearted. I would, however, caution against reading this doleful ditty by candle light, lest the story of

might sport with the senses of the more timid reader.

[64]

To make above ground one d—d flurry!

I earnestly request that the learned college will not do me the injustice to suppose that a man of my delicacy and refined feelings would myself utter any phrase like the above, which has so much the semblance of profanity. But as this personage, before he passed that fatal “bourne” (from which one “traveller” has “returned”) had ever been accustomed, like most of our profession, to rhetorical flourishes of this kind, it must be expected that, on such an important occasion, he would express himself with all his wonted energy; and my veracity as a historian obliges me to give verbatim the speech which the sprite did in fact deliver.

[65]

And cannot pay NINETEEN POUNDS TEN”!!!

The terrible shock given not only to Mr Addington, but to the credit of the British nation, by this famous sally of that teasing, testy, querulous, alarming, honorable, cidevant member of the House of Commons, is undoubtedly fresh in the recollection of every person, who has the least smattering in parliamentary debates: and every true patriot and friend to the peace of —— our prime minister, will congratulate the country on the failure of Mr Robson’s election, as well as that of his co-operator, Mr Jones, into the new parliament.

[66]

Found Hawkesbury’s letter all a take-in.

Now I know the man who cobbled up the famous humbug peace with France, which, in my opinion, was a manœuvre that did honor to its inventor. He tenants a garret adjacent to mine. But Dr Caustic is an honorable man, and twice the £5000 offered by the stock exchange, with the £500 by the lord mayor, for his apprehension, would not tempt him to expose the neck of his friend to the noose of justice. This I premise, that the Bow street officers may not misapply their time and talents in any futile attempts to wheedle or extort the secret.

[67]

Broke a whole gallipot of wrath!

I beseech you, gentlemen, to suspend your impatience relative to this wonderful achievement, till you have soared through a few stanzas. In the meantime, however, I wish that this my favorite hero, and burthen of my song, should stand high with your worships, and be the object of the humble admiration, not only of your honorable body, but of mankind in general: and I, myself, shall take the liberty to trample on all those, who dare call in question his infallibility. I have a knowledge of but few, who more deserve to be trodden upon on this occasion than the conductors of certain foreign literary journals, who, not aware of the inconceivable services which Dr H. has rendered the medical host by his ardent zeal against their common enemy, Perkinism, have expressed their sentiments of him, and his works, with that indifference, which must have arisen from their want of knowledge of his achievements.

Among the most prominent of this junto should be mentioned the Medical Repository, at New York, conducted by professors Mitchell and Miller, of that place, the former of whom I understand is a representative in the Congress of the United States, an eminent physician, and the celebrated author of what is usually termed the “Mitchellian Theory of Contagion,” alterations in the French Chemical Nomenclature, &c. The latter, I am told, is likewise a physician of great respectability.

Now that two such characters should presume to represent Dr H. as a man, whose “vanity is more conspicuous than his ability,” is a circumstance which, while it excites my surprise, rouses my resentment. However, to accomplish their disgrace and his renown, I shall concisely state his magnanimous conduct to them, and their ungracious return.

Dr H. in great condescension to the poor wretches of the United States, who, through the ignorance and inexperience of their medical practitioners, were likely to be extirpated by the yellow fever, addressed them in an affectionate letter, and proclaimed the barbarity and unskilfulness of their physicians, in a very appropriate and becoming manner. He even kindly apprized the Academy of Medicine, at Philadelphia, that their proceedings and reasonings on the disease among them were “frivolous, inadequate, and groundless,” and communicated many other facts equally useful and important.

Now, whether his statements were true or false, those foreigners ought to have been grateful to Dr H. for honoring them with the information. But on the contrary, they say that “a poison, which, in the city of New York, has destroyed, within three months, the lives of more than twenty practitioners of medicine, well deserves to be traced and understood by the survivors.” They even have the audacity to assert, that “American physicians and philosophers, who have viewed the rise and progress of pestilence, walked amidst it by day and by night, year after year, and endured its violence on their own persons, almost to the extinction of their lives,” ought to be as competent judges of the cause and cure of the disease as Dr Haygarth, who has never seen a case of it.

After entering into a copious (about 20 pages) and what they seem to think a learned investigation of my great friend’s theory and sentiments, they have dared to refute his reasoning, and turn it to ridicule.

These presumptuous writers finally close their unreasonable account of Dr Haygarth, in quotations from Dr Caldwell, who, it appears, is a fellow of the college of physicians of Philadelphia, and a very ungentleman-like fellow too, for he has also had the rashness to descant on some of the works of Dr Haygarth in terms following.

“Perhaps he (Dr Haygarth) may found the boldness of his pretensions as an author on the maturity of his years. Many writers less youthful are more modest; and it is to be lamented that grey hairs give no infallible earnest of either wisdom or liberality. We will not positively assert that he is not a man of profound erudition; but we have no reason whatever to convince us that he is. Perhaps he may pride himself on being a native of the same country which produced a Harvey, a Sydenham, a Cullen, and a Hunter. We entreat him to remember, that weeds may infest the same ground which has been overshadowed by the lordly adansonia, and that the same clime gives birth to the lion and the jackal.” Medical Repository, vol. v. p. 333. Oh, fie! fie!

[68]

Till our aerial cutter runs.

My mode of commencing an airy tour, mounted, Muse and Co. on a poetical pony, which, by the way, is metamorphosed into a cutter, may, perhaps, be objected to by your fastidious critics, as a liberty even beyond a poet’s licentiousness. But there is nothing which we men of genius more thoroughly detest than any attempt to fetter our faculties with the frigid rules of criticism. Besides, sense or nonsense, poetry or gingling, it is perfectly Della Cruscan.

[69]

“A Wilderness of suns!”

This “proud” passage, together with “O thou!”—“GENIUS or MUSE!”—and “CATARACT OF LIGHT!”—are the legitimate offspring of that prince of poets, who rose to such a towering pitch of poetry,

I should have been happy to have fascinated your worships with further specimens of the same sort of sublimity, could I have retained them in memory. I have been so solicitous for your gratification in this particular, that I have made a painful, though bootless search, throughout the metropolis and its suburbs, for these more than sybiline oracles. Indeed, I have reason to fear, that all Della Crusca’s effusions are irretrievably lost, except the few fragments which I have here pickled for the behoof of posterity.

[70]

But Gifford comes, with why and wherefore.

The admirers of your polite poetry can never sufficiently anathematize the author of the Baviad and Mæviad for extirpating, root and branch, a species of sentimental ditty, which might be scribbled, without the trouble of “sense to prose;” an object certainly of no small consequence with your bon ton readers and writers of rhyme. How could a sentimental Ensign or love-lorn Lieutenant be better employed than in sobbing over “Laura’s tinkling trash,” or weeping in concert with the “mad jangle of Matilda’s lyre?” Besides, there ought to be whipped syllabub adapted to the palates of those who cannot relish “Burns’ pure healthful nurture.” Mr Gifford should be sensible, that reducing poetry to the standard of common sense is clipping the wings of genius. For example; there is no describing what sublime and Della Cruscan-like capers I should myself have been cutting in this “Wilderness of suns;” for I was about to prepare a nosegay of comets, and string the spheres like beads for a lady’s necklace; but was not a little apprehensive lest Mr G. or some other malignant critic should persuade the public, that my effusions of fancy were little better than the rant of a bedlamite.

[71]

And tollutate o’er turnpike path.

[72]

Behold! great Haygarth and his corps.

I here wish to give a concise sketch of the doctor’s necromantic process, so well calculated to give the tractors the kick out of Bath and Bristol, where they were rapidly making the most sacrilegious encroachments on the unpolluted shrine of our profession. I would recommend similar proceedings to every member of the college, and every worthy brother who is truly anxious to preserve the dignity and honor of the professional character. But would premise, that, when the like experiments are made, which, I trust, will be very generally by the whole profession, I would particularly recommend that the doctor’s prudence, in not admitting any of the friends of the tractors at the scene of action, should be strictly imitated; and also his discretion in choosing, as subjects for the experiment, the ignorant and miserable paupers of an infirmary, whose credulity will assist very much in operations of this sort. I also enjoin them to bear in mind his hint, “That if any person would repeat the experiment with wooden tractors, it should be done with due solemnity; during the process, the wonderful cures said to be performed by the tractors, should be particularly related. Without these indispensable aids, other trials will not prove so successful as those which are here reported.” Haygarth’s book, page 4.

It can scarcely be necessary for me to hint to my discreet brethren, in addition, that should they try the real tractors afterwards (which, however, I rather advise them not to do at all) the whole of these aids of the mind are to be as strictly avoided. I had like to have forgotten to say, that the means used in the instance which follows to increase the solemnity of the scene, were a capital display of wigs, canes, stopwatches; and a still more solemn and terrific spectacle, about a score of the brethren. The very commencement serves to show how “necessary” was all this display to ensure the success of these wooden tractors.

“It was often necessary to play the part of a necromancer, to describe circles, squares, triangles, and half the figures in geometry, on the parts affected, with the small end of the (wooden) tractors. During all this time we conversed upon the discoveries of Franklin and Galvani, laying great stress on the power of metallic points attracting lightning, and conveying it to the earth harmless. To a more curious farce I was never witness. We were almost afraid to look each other in the face, lest an involuntary smile should remove the mask from our countenances, and dispel the charm.” Haygarth’s book, page 16.

A very ingenious friend of Dr H. and the glorious cause in which he is engaged, has conceived an improvement on this process. While the above operation is going on, surely, the adroit necromancer would handle his virgula divinitoria with far greater effect, and himself appear much more in character, by using a suitable incantation. The following has, therefore, been proposed for the general use of the profession.

Lest you should not have sufficient ingenuity to comprehend the object of Dr Haygarth, in producing these operations on the minds of those paupers, by the aid of such means as he employed, I must try to explain it. It was to induce an inference on the part of the public, that if, by any means whatsoever, effects can be produced on the mind of a poor bedridden patient, whether such effect be favorable or unfavorable (as the latter was often the case in Haygarth’s experiments) ergo, Perkins’s tractors cure diseases by acting on the mind also, whether on a human or brute subject. Should any person be so uncivil and unreasonable as to start the objection to this logic, that with the same propriety all medicines might also be supposed to produce their effects by an action on the mind, I particularly advise (provided such person be a noted coward) that you challenge him or her to a duel: but if, on the contrary, he or she be a terrible Mac Namara-like fellow, modestly reply that it was all a joke, and you hope there was no offence.

[73]

O man of mineral putrefaction.

In the famous address to which we have before referred, we find a most remarkable discovery of the hero of our tale, relative to the origin of “stench,” which alone would entitle our doctor to be numbered amongst the most profound of all philosophers, and which we shall give the world in his own words.

“It is too obvious to escape notice, that the stench arising from the hold of a ship proceeds from the putrefaction of substances which belong to all the three kingdoms of nature, vegetable, animal, and mineral!!”

[74]

A certain crazy Russian emperor.

Czar Paul, emperor of all the Russias, &c. who had a very benevolent desire to settle the disputes, which agitated Europe, by virtue of tilt and tournament, among those potentates, whose quarrelsome dispositions so often set their subjects by the ears.

[75]

But first invade the old bell-wether.

This sublime simile, gentlemen, will meet the unequivocal approbation of those who are acquainted with the rustic manners and natural history of Kamtschatka. The leading wether of a flock of sheep is ever invested with a bell, pendent from his neck by a collar, not only as an honorary badge of distinction, but for the purpose of alarming the shepherd, in case of invasion by any of the merciless tenants of the forest. The wolf always makes it his first object to silence this jingler, that he may with the greater impunity destroy his fleecy companions.

[76]

Will most assuredly acquit him.

Why not, as well as acquit Capt. Mac, who evaded all harm, in consequence of his not permitting the “sun to go down on his wrath?” Mr Justice Grose, however, appears to me to have proved himself to have been a very gross justice, in telling the jury that the law does not recognise certain nice distinctions which are adopted by men of honor. If, however, his assertion be true, it is proper that there should be an act of parliament passed immediately, giving US GENTLEMEN the privilege of killing each other, which would save government the expense of hemp, hangmen, &c.

[77]

In crows and infants, dogs and horses.

These are among the patients whose cures are attested in Perkins’s publication, in which he has introduced them to show that his tractors do not cure by an influence on the imagination. The fallacy of any deductions, drawn from such cases, in favor of the tractors, will be apparent from the following most learned and elaborate investigation of the subject.

There are no animals in existence, I shall incontestably prove, that are more susceptible of impressions from imagination, than those above mentioned.

To begin with the crow. Strong mental faculties ever indicate a vivid imagination; and what being, except Minerva’s beauty, the owl, is more renowned for such faculties than the crow?—Who does not know that he will smell gunpowder three miles, if it be in a gun, and he imagine it be intended for his destruction? These emblems of sagacity, besides “fetching and carrying like a spaniel,” and talking as well or better than colonel Kelly’s parrot (which by the by I suspect to have been a crow) are, as Edwards assures us in his Natural History, “the planters of all sorts of wood and trees.” “I observed,” says he, “a great quantity of crows very busy at their work. I went out of my way on purpose to view their labor, and I found they were planting a grove of oaks.” Vol. v. Pref. xxxv.

These geniuses always can tell, and always have told, since the days of Virgil, the approach of rain. That poet says,

They can likewise tell when bad news is approaching, as we learn from the same writer,

Now I beg leave to know what mortal can do more? and to suppose a crow not blessed with those more brilliant parts, under which imagination is classed, is to do them a singular injustice, which I shall certainly resent on every occasion.

Now as to infants. Whoever has been in the way of an acquaintance with some of the more musical sort of these little gentry (like my seven last darlings for instance) and has been serenaded with the dulcet sonatas of their warbling strains, will not be disposed to deny their powers on the imagination of others. I have known the delusion practised so effectually by these young conjurers, that I have myself imagined my head was actually aching most violently, even on the point of cracking open; but on going beyond the reach of their magic spell, that is, out of hearing, my head has been as free from pain as it necessarily must be at this moment, while I am penning this lucid performance. Now, I maintain it to be most unphilosophical, and totally opposite to certain new principles in ethics, which I shall establish in a future publication, to suppose that infants should be able to impart either pleasure or pain, by operating on the imagination, and not themselves possess a large share of that imagination, by the aid of which they operate to so much effect upon others.

Next come dogs. Dr Shaw, in his Zoology, vol. i. p. 289, informs us, “that a dog belonging to a nobleman of the Medici family always attended his master’s table, changed the plates for him, carried him his wine in a glass placed on a salver, without spilling the smallest drop.” The celebrated Leibnitz mentions another, a subject of the elector of Saxony, who could discourse in an “intelligible manner,” especially on “tea, coffee, and chocolate;” whether in Greek, Latin, German, or English, however, he has not stated; but Dr Shaw, alluding to the same dog, says, undoubtedly under the influence of prejudice, “he was somewhat of a truant, and did not willingly exert his talents, being rather pressed into the service of literature.”

Indeed, our greatest naturalists assure us, that this animal is far before the human species in every ennobling quality. Buffon makes man a very devil compared with the dog; and had he come directly to the point, I presume he would have told us that the dog is one link above man in the great chain from the fossil to the angel. “Without the dog,” says Buffon, “how could man have been able to tame and reduce other animals into slavery? To serve his own safety, it was necessary to make friends among those animals whom he found capable of attachment. The fruit of associating with the dog was the conquest and the peaceable possession of the earth. The dog will always preserve his empire. He reigns at the head of a flock, and makes himself better understood than the voice of the shepherd” (well he might, for it appears he is more knowing, more powerful, and more just.) “Safety, order, and discipline, are the fruits of his vigilance and activity. They are a people submitted to his management, whom he conducts and protects, and against whom he never employs force but for the preservation of peace and good order.” Barr’s Buffon, vol. v. p. 302.

It is to me somewhat remarkable that theorizing Frenchmen, many of whose discoveries are scarcely less important than my own, cannot make them apply in such a manner as to effect some practical good in society. Buffon discovered that a dog was a species of demi-god, and appears on the point of worshipping this great Anubis of the Egyptians. Voltaire tells us, that Frenchmen are half monkey and half tiger, and everybody knows that the one is insufferably mischievous, and the other infinitely ferocious. Now it is surprising that these philosophers could not contrive to improve the breed by a little of the canine blood. Indeed, I should advise them to import some of our Bond street male puppies, to be paired with French female monkeys, and I will venture to assert that there will be very little of the tiger perceivable in their offspring. And since a dog, as Buffon says, “reigns with so much dignity at the head of a flock, will always preserve his empire, never employs force but for the preservation of peace and good order,” and is endowed with so many other great qualifications, which seem to denote him to be a proper personage to wield the sceptre of dominion, I would seriously advise the abbe Sieyes, when he frames his 999th Constitution for the free French Republic (which it is said he has already begun to manufacture) so to organize the executive branch, that at least one of the consuls should be a true blooded English bull-dog.

After the ample proof I have now given of the infinite superiority of the dog to man, when his merits are fairly estimated, which it is very difficult for us, being interested, to do without prejudice, I shall take it for granted, that he must possess all the brilliancy even of a poet’s imagination, and therefore that he is far more likely to be cured by imagination than man.

It now remains to speak of horses, and these (not to mention the Bucephalus of Alexander, or the Pegasus of doctor Caustic) I shall show, in a very few words, can boast of performances and qualifications, to which a lively fancy in the comparison is but as the wit of an oyster to the wisdom of a philosopher. One of the most scientific nations that ever existed, renowned alike for its refinements in the arts, and prowess in war, has been compelled to yield the palm to the superior attainments of a horse, and acknowledge its inability to achieve what he most readily effected. Ten long years was the whole power of Greece engaged in an ineffectual siege of far-famed Troy. The bravest of armies, commanded by heroes allied to the gods, assailed the foe in vain. At this disheartening period stepped forth a wooden horse, and promised a victory, provided his plans were adopted. Aware of the horse’s great capacity, which enabled him to comprehend a great number of subjects, the sagacious Greeks entered into his measures, and Troy was levelled in the dust.

If all this could have been accomplished by a wooden horse, none but a Perkinite will be so absurd as to pretend that one composed of flesh and blood, like man, does not enjoy far greater privileges, among which are those of receiving as many cures by the influence of imagination as he pleases.

Now then, gentlemen, I trust that if any man will con over, digest, comprehend, and admit this my ingenious and learned exposition of the fallacy of the arguments in favor of the tractors, so much harped upon by our adversaries, which are drawn from the circumstance of their having cured crows and infants, dogs and horses, he will with great facility be enabled to confound and overthrow them on all occasions, provided he enforce and proclaim it with the ardency its importance deserves.

[78]

For pain itself is all ideal.

So said the learned bishop Berekley, in a scientific treatise called Principles of Human Knowledge, in which his reverence makes it apparent, to those who have a clue to his metaphysical labyrinth, that there is no such thing as matter, entity, or sensation, distinct from the mind which perceives, or thinks it perceives, such ideas or substances. The bishop’s authority being so pat in point, I cannot but admire that it has not more frequently been adduced in opposition to the tractors.

[79]

Then man, of course, those drugs to take.

This CAPITAL argument, that it might make a CAPITAL figure, I have ordered my printer to put in CAPITAL letters, and I hope it will make a CAPITAL impression on your worshipful intellects. But still I have not given it half that pre-eminence which its importance claims, under existing circumstances. A great hue and cry has been raised by the Perkinites, by which some of the less penetrating part of the profession have been awed into silence, respecting the duty of medical practitioners. They say that it is the duty of a medical man to employ only such means as will cure his patient in the most safe, cheap, and expeditious manner. This infamous pretension takes its origin from no other person than Perkins himself. That you may individually be aware of the effrontery with which it is brought forward, I shall, in this note, copy from Perkins’s book his manner of treating the subject. Your worships will form some idea of the magnitude of this objection of our adversaries, in their own estimation, and the mischief it has already occasioned, not only in Great Britain, but abroad, when I inform you that it has been echoed in both the English and foreign journals, and in many of them treated as a complete refutation of the arguments of Dr Haygarth, and of all who object against the tractors, on account of their curing diseases merely by operating on the imagination. Among other foreign publications, I observe that the 21st volume of the Bibliothèque Britannique, printed at Geneva, closes a long account (40 pages) of “Perkinisme” with this “petite histoire de Mr Perkins.”

“A gentleman came from the country to London, for the advantage of medical assistance, in a complaint of peculiar obstinacy and distress. After being under the care of an eminent physician several weeks, and paying him upwards of thirty guineas, without any relief, he was induced to try the tractors. To be short, they performed a remarkable cure; the person was perfectly restored in about ten days. The physician, calling soon after, was informed of the circumstance. He began lamenting that so sensible a person as the patient should be caught in the use of so contemptible a piece of quackery as the tractors. After assuring the patient that he had thrown away his five guineas, for that it was well established by Dr Haygarth, that a brick-bat, tobacco-pipe, goose-quill, or even the bare finger, would perform the same cures, he was interrupted by his patient: ‘And are you sincere in your belief that you could have produced, by those means, the same effects upon me, which I have experienced from the tractors?’ ‘Do I believe it? Ay, I know it; and that a thousand similar cures might be effected by means equally simple and ridiculous.’ ‘And sir,’ interrupted the gentleman again, in a more stern and serious tone, ‘why did you not cure me then, by those simple means? Remember I have paid you thirty guineas, under the supposition that you were exerting your utmost endeavors to cure me, and that in the most safe, cheap, and expeditious manner. You now, in substance, acknowledge, that, although in possession of the means of restoring me to health, for the dishonorable purpose of picking my pocket, you continued me upon the bed of sickness! Who turns out to be the impostor? Let your own conscience answer.’ The justness of the retort, it will be easily believed, precluded the possibility of an exculpation.” Perkins’s New Cases, p. 145.

Had I been the physician, however, I would have rejoined with arguments, not dissimilar to that which is so beautifully expressed in the above stanza. I would have told him that the Author of nature most certainly would not have created either a poisonous or salubrious vegetable, without intending that it should “dose and double dose” his creature man.

Should it be objected that the tractors being also created substances ought also to be used, I could ingenuously retort, they were created in America, a country whose natives are Indians, an inferior order of beings to man, as some great philosophers before me have asserted, and who, it is evident, are the only order of creatures, on whom it was intended the tractors should be used.

I have no particular wish to injure Dr Jenner, or I should positively overturn him and all his adherents with my resistless arguments. If I were not willing that he should retain his popularity, I should make it appear that the small-pox was created with the intent of being universally propagated among the human race for the purpose of mortifying female vanity; and Jenner’s attempt to extirpate it, by substituting the cow-pox, which ought to have been confined to the quadrupeds, among which it originated, as the tractors ought to have been to the Indians, is the extreme of presumption, and the height of iniquity. I cannot but conceive that our bishops and clergy are very remiss in not endeavoring to dissuade from such enormous, innovating practices.

[80]

That learn’d physicians pine with hunger.

No man who possesses a heart, certainly none who possesses bowels, can view us reduced to this deplorable condition, and hear this pathetic appeal, without the sincerest commiseration. The eminent services that our profession have rendered mankind, in contributing to avert some of the greatest curses that ever befel the civilized part of the world, are too well known, and have been too frequently acknowledged to be forgotten, ungratefully, in the day of our adversity. The testimony to this effect of the judicious, the humane Addison, ought often to be brought before the public eye.

“We may lay it down as a maxim,” says that intelligent writer, “that when a nation abounds with physicians it grows thin of people. Sir William Temple is very much puzzled to find out a reason why the northern hive, as he calls it, does not send such prodigious swarms, and overrun the world with Goths and Vandals, as it did formerly: but had that excellent author observed that there were no students in physic among the subjects of Thor and Woden, and that this science very much flourishes in the north at present, he might have found a better solution for this difficulty than any of those he has made use of.” Spectator, No. 21.

[81]

The patient save, but starve the doctor.

This would be abominable. Physicians, in general, are a hale hearty race of men, as, indeed, must be readily conceived from their prudent maxims in regard to the preservation of their own health:—they take no physic. No; they are too well acquainted with its tendency. Now, to starve so sturdy and powerful a body, when his majesty is in want of such subjects to check the ambitious strides of restless Buonaparte, as appears from the king’s declaration of this day (May the 16th, 1803,) in preference to letting their miserable patients expire, whom Providence evidently intended should die off, is, I trust, too absurd and unreasonable an idea to be admitted.

[82]

Like Perkinites, they find Mecenases.

The Perkineans have no cause to boast of the extent of their patronage, for the poor tawny reptile chimney-sweepers have of late interested the friends of humanity in their behalf quite as much. Your worships will derive from this circumstance a very pleasant source for sneering at our opponents, which I am sure you will gladly embrace, whenever opportunity presents.

[83]

Except by knaves retired from practice.

This, gentlemen, is a circumstance of no small moment, and which I trust you will see the necessity of looking at with some seriousness. Some of our profession have, to their eternal disgrace, since their retirement on their fortunes, deserted our cause, and are now to be found in the ranks of our enemies. These fellows have the presumption to suggest that their duty to the interests of the community supersedes that which they owe to their old brethren, the unreasonableness of which sentiment I conceive to be self-evident, and therefore shall not trouble myself to prove it. Several have even addressed to the Perkinean Institution communications in favor of the metallic tractors, for publication, three of which are already laid before the public. The first on this list is Mr Lyster, late of Dublin, who having been above twenty years senior surgeon of the Dublin hospital, retired to Bath, where he now seems even to take delight in benefitting the mean and miserable poor, to wanton injury of his own dear brethren. To show the extent of his malice, he has, in his communication to the Perkinean Society, introduced statements of remarkable cures by the tractors; among others one of total blindness of many years duration, in which all medical skill had previously failed; and, to wind up this tale of infamy, he has even ventured to censure, indirectly, my great champion, Dr Haygarth, and to hint that his proceedings were not accompanied with honorable intentions!

Next on this trio list are Mr Yatman, of Chelsea, and Dr Fuller, of Upper Brook street; the conduct of both of whom is equally, if not more reprehensible than Lyster’s. These two also call in the lame, the halt, and the blind, and, as if to spite their brethren who have drugs to sell, cure them with the tractors without fee or reward! Such conduct is so atrocious that if your worships should think proper to have them indicted, and Mr Erskine or Mr Garrow object to defend the cause of such clients, I, counsellor Caustic (remember I am LL.D.) will manage it for you, and, provided I can but get that same jury which decided that captain Macnamara was not accessory to the death of Col. Montgomery, I will procure the defendants to be sent to Botany Bay, or at least as far as Coventry.

To show the barbarity and wantonness of these two men, I will close this note by the following quotation from the letter of one of them, Dr Fuller, who, after a practice of nearly thirty years in medicine, and by which he has secured his own independence, seems now to amuse himself in undermining those of us who are still dependant. After a statement of a number of great cures by the tractors, and proving, by his own trials on infants, &c. that they do not act on imagination, which Dr Haygarth so laudably attempted to show, he proceeds:—“I derive much satisfaction in noticing among the more liberal and respectable part of my profession an increased favorable opinion of Perkinism, and a readiness to allow of its use among their patients, when proposed by others. To expect more than this, would be to expect more than human nature in its present state will admit. It must be an extraordinary exertion of virtue and humanity for a medical man, whose livelihood depends either on the sale of drugs, or on receiving a guinea for writing a prescription, which must relate to those drugs, to say to his patient, ‘You had better purchase a pair of tractors to keep in your family; they will cure you without the expense of my attendance, or the danger of the common medical practice.’ For very obvious reasons, medical men must never be expected to recommend the use of Perkinism. The tractors must trust for their patronage to the enlightened and philanthropic out of the profession, or to medical men retired from practice, and who know of no other interest than the luxury of relieving the distressed. And I do not despair of seeing the day, when but very few of this description as well as private families will be without them.” If Dr Fuller were obliged to live in my garret one month, he would sing a different tune.

[84]

Who make, quoth Darwin, good manure.

Besides the advantage of showing how reverently this great philosopher and philanthropist could speak of religion, I am sure I shall render an essential service to agriculturists, by adducing the following quotation. I bring it forward the more readily, as I find that the Board of Agriculture have been so negligent of the interest of that noble art, as not yet to have recommended the universal adoption of this measure.

“There should be no burial places in churches, or churchyards, where the monuments of departed sinners shoulder God’s altar and pollute his holy places with dead men’s bones. But proper burial places should be consecrated out of towns, and divided into two compartments, the earth from one of which, saturated with animal decomposition, should be taken away once in ten or twenty years for the purposes of agriculture, and sand or clay, or less fertile soil brought into its place.” Darwin’s Phytologia, p. 242.

Here your worships will perceive that there is a prospect, if this advice is followed, that we may enjoy the privilege of eating, instead of drinking our friends, which would be something of an improvement on our idea, communicated in page 58.

[85]

Would serve for stock to make mosquitoes.

Among other speculations also in the cause of humanity, bequeathed us by this friend of man, are the following, which will prove a great consolation to those who have foolishly supposed that the bloodshed and devastation, produced by war, were circumstances which ought to be lamented.

These remarks are published by Dr Darwin, as written under his own observations in the manuscript of his book, by a “philosophical friend,” whom he left in his library. It is supposed, however, that the doctor wrote them himself. At least the sentiments have his sanction.

“It consoles me to find, as I contemplate the whole of organized nature, that it is not in the power of any one personage, whether statesman or hero, to produce by his ill employed activity, so much misery as might have been supposed. Thus, if a Russian army, in these insane times, after having endured a laborious march of many hundred miles, is destroyed by a French army, in defence of their republic, what has happened? Forty thousand human creatures, dragged from their homes and connexions, cease to exist, and have manured the earth; but the quantity of organized matter, of which they were composed, presently revives in the forms of millions of microscopic animals, vegetables, and insects, and afterwards of quadrupeds and men; the sum of whose happiness is, perhaps, greater than that of the harrassed soldier, by whose destruction they have gained their existence! Is not this a consoling idea to a mind of universal sympathy? I fear you will think me a misanthrope, but I assure you a contrary sensation dwells in my bosom; and though I commiserate the evils of all organized beings, “Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto.”” Phytologia, p. 558.

[86]

Are swept by pestilence and dearth.

Last words of Dr Darwin. I take no small credit to myself, for being one of the first to bring into notice the latest and the most sublime of this sublime philosopher’s sublime speculations. The fountain from which this radiant stream of illumination flows is denominated, among booksellers, The Temple of Nature.

To paint all the writer’s conceptions of the mansion of that old lady, and her own most singular qualifications, would be a task even beyond the abilities of a Caustic. Mr Fuseli, however, has painted, his conceptions on the occasion, which in one of his designs, appear, so far as I can comprehend him, to be simply these:—In his frontispiece to the work, he represents one beautiful lady pointing at, or rather fumbling about, (somewhat indecently, I must confess) a middle or third breast of another beautiful lady, whom I suppose to be Dame Nature;

This third breast I take to be the painter’s emblem of the discoveries of Dr Darwin—implying that their existence is as evident as that a woman has three breasts. But, not to digress; the doctor ascertains that

Some unphilosophical theorists have foolishly supposed that this sweeping plan of Dr Darwin, which that philosopher appears to have introduced, lest “prolific hordes” should “deluge their terraqueous beds,” might as well be deferred till a few of the “superfluous” acres on the earth’s surface were reduced to a state of cultivation. I should advise to employ these supernumeraries in navigating polar ices within, the tropics, as recommended by the doctor in the Botanic Garden, were I not apprehensive lest I should thereby in some measure, destroy the operation of Saint Pierre’s tides. See note on page 70, Canto i.

[87]

Must “duck” to death his stubborn pate.

More last words of Dr Darwin.

I have exhibited this couplet at all the assemblages of poetizing brethren in Grub street and St Giles’s, not omitting the inhabitants of the “Wits’ corner, at the Chapter coffee-house, the elevated tenants of the cider cellar in Maiden Lane, and Col. Hanger’s knights of the round table,” all of whom agree in acknowledging the elegance and correctness of the metaphor, and that its beauties are so transcendently exquisite, and beyond the ken of mortal eye, as to be perfectly incomprehensible.

[88]

That since “to die is but to sleep.”

I suspect that my intimate friend and correspondent Buonaparte, is a full convert to Dr Darwin’s doctrine of death and its consequences. For, when he declared to lord Whitworth his determination to invade England, although there were a hundred chances to one in favor of his going to the bottom, he was undoubtedly calculating on a comfortable nap after the fatigues of government.

[89]

In bats and bed-bugs, fleas and flies.

It has been a matter of curious inquiry among some of my corresponding garreters, whether this philosopher himself, in the latter stages of his existence, enjoyed much consolation from reflecting that the “organic matter” which entered into his own composition, was about to be employed for the important purpose of giving “new life” to “unnumbered insects.”

[90]

Vast “monuments of past delight.”

These “monuments of past delight,” Darwin says,

Thus taught by this wondrous sage, I trust the friend to humanity will suppose it best to let the poor, infirm and decrepid die off as fast as possible, to “manure the earth,” that the quantity of organized matter of which they were composed, may revive in the forms of millions of microscopic animals, vegetables and insects, make “monuments of past delight,” &c. Therefore it is to be hoped, that the promoters of the Perkinean institution will prove as despicable in respect to numbers, as they are deficient in understanding, especially in comprehending the great and glorious truths of modern philosophy.

[91]

They may have rest, we—elbow room.

If your worships have not read Mr Malthus’s Essay on the Principles of Population, I advise you to buy the book immediately, and set yourselves about something like an effort to comprehend its contents. You will there find, I cannot now recollect the page, that population has a tendency to increase in a geometrical ratio, but that subsistence must be limited to an arithmetical ratio. That the world would soon swarm with inhabitants in such a manner that in years of the greatest plenty we should be under the disagreeable necessity of turning anthropophagi, and, like the famous Pantagruel, eat pilgrims with our salad, were not the principle of population restrained by two very useful predominant principles, viz. “VICE and MISERY;” the former of which is happily exemplified in the extravagance and luxury of your worships, and the latter correctly expressed in the poverty of your worships’ petitioner. You will likewise find in the same volume, passim, that after war, pestilence, and famine have laid waste a country, there is an immediate increase of births, in consequence of the principle of population being let loose to take its natural operation in replenishing the earth; or, in other words, because there is more elbow room for the survivors. Now, this being correct reasoning, it must be wonderfully wrong to try to keep alive poor folks, who are a dead weight on population, destroy the means of subsistence, prevent early marriages, and, by keeping themselves above ground, stand in the way of their betters.

[92]

The poker take and lay them level.

Please not imagine that I would be understood to recommend this “retort courteous” in the most unqualified sense, or that it be exercised on every occasion. On the contrary, the due performance of it will require no small degree of prudence and discretion. Indeed, I would have you use the poker, or any other violent and weighty arguments of this kind, only when your antagonist happens to be a woman, a child, or some debilitated and cowardly wretch who will submit without any chance of your meeting with unpleasant resistance.

As to the justice of this mode of response, there exists no doubt, and therefore dread no decisions in foro conscientiæ, because the extreme heinousness of your adversaries’ provocation will appear from the following consideration. To deprive you of an argument, for which you have sacrificed everything dear to obtain, must, confessedly be regarded as a most outrageous proceeding. Now, this is exactly the case in the present instance; for in your attempt to show that medical men believe and trust in no medicine, the modus operandi of which they do not comprehend, you make a sacrifice of truth, decency, and common sense, the full reward of which sacrifice you ought to enjoy unmolested. That no man can explain how mercury poisons, bark cures an intermittent fever, or opium produces sleep, is confessed by every medical author; and that all these should be used in our practice, without any hesitation, I never heard any person deny, and for this proper and substantial reason; their administration is profitable to the faculty. I have therefore to repeat, that when the Perkinites complain of your rejecting the use of tractors, because their modus operandi cannot be entirely explained, although you adopt the use of drugs, the operation of which is equally or more inexplicable, your sacrifice in support of your ground is so great, that whoever attempts to drive you from such ground deserves to be laid low with the first weapon that comes to hand.

[93]

Will e’en bewitch the operator.

No part of the learned doctor’s management, in the anti-Perkinistic cause, merits higher eulogy than this most rational explanation of that most irrational practice. So cogently does an innate principle of equity control me, that I am absolutely coerced to offer, at the shrine of the heroic doctor, my tributary dole of the incense of admiration, for having presented our profession such a powerful knock-me-down argument, wherewith to buffet the common enemy.

The sagacious doctor having published a scientific treatise against the tractors, demonstrating that “they act on the patient’s imagination,” Perkins, came out in reply, with all the fury of an Irish rebel, and declared that the doctor deserved to be trounced for not suffering his readers to know, that the tractors pretended to cure infants and brute animals, though numerous cases to that effect had then been published; and in that reply proclaimed that Dr H. purposely endeavored to suppress such facts, that he might, with greater facility, induce the public to swallow the deductions drawn from his magical manœuvres in the Bath and Bristol hospitals. Now, admitting the doctor managed in this way, I am sure he was perfectly right in so doing. The end in view, according to established principles of modern morality, will ever justify the means taken to accomplish that end. In this case, the end in view was most important—nothing less than the downfall of Perkinism, and the consequent aggrandizement of our profession. Should any of our opponents be so captious as to assert, that such principles and such motives of action should not be encouraged in society—that they have a pernicious tendency, and other nonsense of that sort, I must take the liberty to refer them to the first consul of the French republic, whose conduct has ever been modelled according to the principles above stated, and who is certainly the most powerful logician of the age, perfectly able to confound those who shut their eyes against the light of conviction.

But to revert to the doctor’s treatise, and Perkins’s impudent replication. The man who could raise the very old gentleman himself, by the legitimate powers of necromancy, was not so easily defeated. Accordingly he returns to the charge in another edition—admits the existence of the numerous cases on infants, horses, &c. but lays them all level with the following unanswerable argument.—“The proselytes of Perkinism having been driven from every other argument, have, as a last resource, alleged that the patent metallic tractors have removed the disorders of infants and horses. Even this flimsy pretence is capable of a satisfactory refutation. In these cases it is not the patient, but the observer, who is deceived by his own imagination!!!” See Haygarth’s book, page 40. Mirabile dictu!

[94]

Then quote his lady’s ECCHYMOSIS.

The celebrated story of the lady’s ecchymosis comes handed down to your worships by five successive reporters. The lady incog. who makes so conspicuous a figure in Dr Haygarth’s narration, told another lady, who told a medical friend of Dr H. who told Dr Caustic, who tells your worships this important anecdote. Now, as “in the multitude of counsellors there is safety,” so in a multitude of reporters there is certainty. But to the story; which I shall give in the language of Dr H.’s medical friend aforesaid.

“A lady informed me, that a lady of her acquaintance, who had great faith in the efficacy of the tractors, on seeing a small ecchymosis, about the size of a silver penny, at the corner of the eye, desired to try on it the effect of her favorite remedy. The lady, who was intended to be the subject of the trial, consented, and the other lady produced the instruments, and, after drawing them four or five times over the spot, declared that it changed to a paler color; and on repeating the use of them a few minutes longer, that it had almost vanished, and was scarcely visible, and departed in high triumph at her success. I was assured by the lady who underwent the operation, that she looked in the glass immediately after, and that not the least visible alteration had taken place!!” (From Haygarth’s book, page 40.)

I had determined to exert my influence in all the medical societies, that the above case be read at the opening of each meeting, until there should not be left of the tractors, in this island, “a wreck behind.” But a far better plan of Dr H. himself has precluded the necessity of this measure, which was to announce in all the advertisements of his book in the public papers, that “it explains why the disorders of infants and horses are said to have been cured by the tractors.” See his daily advertisements in the papers.

Indeed, I am at a loss which to admire most, the pretty fanciful relation above cited, which is all the new edition of the doctor’s treatise against the tractors contains to justify the assertion in the advertisements before mentioned, or his singular skill in constructing such a fabric on this foundation. Did I possess the talents of the doctor in the advertising department, I should announce this my pithy performance to the public, by publishing in all the papers, that the price of the tractors was, in consequence of Dr Caustic’s opposition, fallen to the price of old iron, and Perkins’s pamphlets having been proscribed by physicians, were condemned, and actually burnt by the hangman on execution-day, at the Old Bailey, in the presence of every individual of the college of physicians, and half the citizens of London.

I would beg leave to add to this incomparable Haygarthian demonstration an argument of my own, which I think is not less powerful. It is impossible that these tractors should perform any real cure, as they act solely on the imagination either of the patient or the operator. But cures performed by the power of imagination must be imaginary cures, that is, no cures at all.

[95]

By Haygarth’s tale of lady Hoax.

It is not true, as some sagacious coffee-house politicians have asserted, that madame Hoax (or more correctly double Hoax) is the wife of a Chinese Mandarin, settled on the mountains of the Moon, in Abyssinia, for the purpose of ascertaining the influence of imagination in the cure of diseases. No, gentlemen, she is a baroness of true English breed, more sturdy than a Semiramis, a Penthesilea, or a Joan of Arc, and will prove, in our cause, a championess of pre-eminent prowess. Should your worships wish for further acquaintance with this lady, which in my opinion would be for your mutual advantage, you will take the trouble to inquire at my garret, No. 299, Dyot street, St Giles’s (having removed from my former place of residence, third floor, 327, Grub street, with a view of being nearer my friend, Sir Joseph, in Soho square) and her address shall be at your service.

I am now preparing a most awful tragedy for Drury lane theatre (Mr Sheridan’s approbation being already obtained) to be entitled and called, the Dreadful Downfal of Terrible Tractorizing Confounded Conjuration; in which I propose to introduce a new song, that I have no doubt will be so celebrated as to be the theme of every ballad-singer in the metropolis. I cannot forbear anticipating some small share of that applause, which I have reason to suppose will be piled on Dr Caustic, as soon as he is publicly known as the author of such an inimitable production, by obliging your worships with a part of the chorus to the song aforesaid.

This song is to be set to music by Mr Kelly in his very best style of pathos, sublimity, and crotchets, and to be delightfully demi-semi-quavered to the admiring audience by Mrs Billington. Then, if box, pit, and gallery, should not, una voce, Nick Bottom-like, cry, “Encore! Encore! Let her roar! Let her roar! Once more, once more! Let the squeak and the squall be swelled to a bawl, Dr Caustic will find the door! Find the door! And never go there any more”!!

[96]

Say that the devil never fails.

This stanza contains a legendary tale, which I dare say is as true, as that which commemorates a notable exploit of St. Dunstan in seizing old satan, one dark night in the tenth century, and wringing the nose of his infernal majesty with a pair of red-hot black-smith’s pincers, which made him roar and scold at such a rate, that he awakened and terrified all the good people of Glastonbury and its neighborhood.

[97]

In gulping tractors down, for med’cines.

An old lady of my acquaintance was actually advised by an ingenious son of Galen, an apothecary, resident a few miles north of London, to swallow tractors for an internal complaint. If our profession were to follow this laudable example, and force their patients to swallow them for pills, and then give the public a judicious detail of the terrible consequences, ending with the death of the patients, Perkinism would sink into that contempt in the estimation of the public which it justly deserves.

[98]

In wilds where science ne’er was thought on.

That is, in the United States of America, among Indians and Yankees. You will find, gentlemen, much to the purpose relative to the state of science, where Perkinism originated, in the Monthly Magazine, of January, 1803, under the title of “Animadversions on the present state of literature and taste in the United States, communicated by an English gentleman lately returned from America.” This gentleman gives information that the Americans are wretchedly “behind-hand in science with the Britains.” Indeed, those transatlantic younkers ought, in half a century, to have established universities and other seminaries of learning, at least as old and respectable as those of Oxford and Cambridge, and which should have graduated as many students and produced as many great men. As to the parsimonious spirit of Americans in encouraging science (which this gentleman animadverts upon with laudable indignation) it ought truly to be exclaimed against by us Englishmen, for the weighty reason following: Great Britain, “from time whereof the memory of man runneth not to the contrary” (as judge Blackstone says) hath starved some of her first poets; such for instance as Butler, Otway, Chatterton, Dryden, Savage, &c. &c. &c. &c. consequently (according to the same author) she ought to enjoy the exclusive “customary privilege” of inflicting the horrors of starvation on the sons of the muses: but it must be granted, for the honor of British munificence, that the scientific Herschel, in the decline of life, as a reward for immortalizing his present majesty, by inscribing Georgium Sidus in the great folio of the heavens, is allowed the enormous pension of 80l. per annum!!

This instance of liberality, in rewarding merit, has caused me to suspend my animadversions relative to patronage afforded men of real science in Great Britain, till I can discover whether it be the absolute determination of my countrymen to starve doctor Caustic.

[99]

Say it was twinn’d with monstrous mammoth.

And must, of course, be a most terrible wild beast.—Ladies and gentlemen may form a tolerable idea of the enormity of Perkinism, by viewing the skeleton of a mammoth now exhibiting in Pall Mall, in the very place where lately were to be seen those terrible caricatures of the devil, &c. under the appellation of Fuseli’s Milton Gallery.

[100]

And to go near it you’d be d—d loth.

This manifesto, you will please to recollect, is the language of gentlemen physicians. Now it is well known that you possess a privilege, sanctioned by long and invariable practice, if not founded on act of parliament, to enforce your sentiments by certain energetic expressions, which, in the mouths of people of less consequence, would be considered as very vulgar, and nearly allied to profane swearing. And since your worships ever most manfully exercise this privilege to the full extent of its limits, the present manifesto would have been extremely inapposite and unnatural, had not an ornament of this kind been introduced.

[101]

The boldest sons of Galen call on.

I say the boldest; for we cannot rely on the aid of the whole Esculapian phalanx. Many white-livered dastards, who disgrace our profession, have shown a disposition to remain neuter, or fight under Perkinean banners!

[102]

Than Howard’s fulminating powder.

It is a long time since the public have had any reports from the honorable Mr Howard’s fulminating powder, which, three years since, made so much noise, that the world had reason to expect that the thunderiferous chymist would make no more of exploding to old Nick a whole army of Frenchmen, with Buonaparte at its head, than would a cockney sportsman of shooting a tame goose on the first of September.

Whether this mighty affair is all blown up, or what may have been the cause of the silence of those who defended a thing which so loudly proclaimed its own merits, it becomes Mr Howard to explain.

Of this he may be assured, if he do not stir his stumps in order to fulfil some of the fair promises which he and his friends have made to the Royal Society and the public, of the astonishing achievements they were about to perform, by the demi-omnipotent power of his new invented artificial thunder, I hereby give the alarming intelligence that I will apply my own superior talents to this sonorous subject. Should that happen, those laurels which were designed to decorate the brow of Mr Howard will be tied in a bow-knot round my venerable temples. For, in that case, the learned chymist’s acquisitions, in the art of intonation, will bear no better comparison to those of Dr Caustic, than the clattering wagon-wheels of Salmoneus to the world-astounding thunderbolts of Jupiter. No person can doubt my being able to accomplish all this, who is apprized, as he may be from perusing this performance, of the vast quantity of the most detonating kind of mercury which exists in my composition, and which will fulminate with greater effect, than the gold and silver that line the magnipotent purse of the honorable the heir apparent to the duke of Norfolk.

[103]

“Kill’d off,” at Marengo.

I have several times taken a confounded deal of trouble to haul into my poem this beautiful specimen of parliamentary elocution; and, in my opinion, nothing can be better imagined, or more happily accomplished. Poetry and oratory, as the ancients inform us, were both whelped at one litter; consequently the same phrase which glittered in the harangue of my bull-baiting friend, William Windham, a British senator, cannot fail to cut a dash in the stanza of his seraphical friend, Christopher Caustic, a British poet.

Now, as I am a great admirer of French principles, and that new and accommodating kind of morality, by Frenchmen discovered, and which I ever have and ever will eulogize, to the utmost extent of my faculties, perhaps your worships will express no small degree of wonderment why I should be the intimate friend of a gentleman, the blaze of whose oratory, one would suppose, would have blasted Buonaparte, and even singed the whole French republic. But those who are admitted behind the political curtain will perceive that the tendency of the measures which Mr Windham supports is to promote those jacobinic principles, of which Dr Caustic openly and honestly professes himself to be the determined propagator and defender.

[104]

And never meddle with a strumpet.

Surely, no person will imagine that I would, for the world, allude to any other lady than madam Fame herself.

[105]

And blaze through either frozen zone.

I have very substantial reasons for spreading glad tidings of our redoubtable chieftain among the most distant inhabitants of the globe, in preference to endeavoring to add to his great celebrity “within the periphery of his associates.” And, whereas it has been said that this gentleman’s reputation will ever stand highest where he is either not known at all, or known only by those literary productions, in which he is himself the theme of his own most “ardent praise,” mine shall be the humble task of trumpeting the doctor’s name among the distant inhabitants of this dirty planet; while the doctor shall himself “dip his pen in ethereal and indelible ink, and impress his observations in characters legible in the great volume of the heavens.”

[106]

As one would spit a goose for roasting.

True it is, though “passing strange,” that a great and good man, composed, as he himself can attest, of the very essence of humanity, is often most vilely, most audaciously, and most atrociously bespattered by a set of saucy reviewers.

Those wicked wits, the writers in the Monthly and Critical Reviews, especially the latter, in a critique on one of the late works of a certain doctor of self puffing memory, tells us that “the importance of a man to himself was never more conspicuous than in this publication. Dr Lettsom admits that he has been anticipated by several distinguished authors; but modestly hints that some of his particular friends will form no opinion [respecting the cow-pox] till they have ascertained his sentiments.” They then have the audacity to declare, that “he merits no slight punishment for his pompous inflated language, for his fulsome flattery, and ridiculous exaggeration of every part of the subject.”

See how they speak of a late publication of the doctor on certain charitable institutions:—“Unless to connect these different institutions, to lead the different radii to a centre, while that centre is the author and the editor, who can boast, Quæ ipse misserima vidi, et quorum pars magna fui! we see little advantage in this edition. We mean not to intimate the slightest disapprobation of these institutions, or of humanity in general; but when we see pomp and egotism assuming its garb, when vanity and ostentation occasionally peep from beneath the robe, we feel no little disgust from comparing the fascinating exterior with the unpleasing contents,” &c. They likewise have the impudence to assert that some of the doctor’s plans are “better suited to the superstition of a Hindoo, than to the nature of a rational christian.” And in another review they declare: “We mean not to stoop to any; but will tell Dr Lettsom his faults” [consummate assurance!!] “as well as any other author; nor will we conceal that mean mark of a little mind, over-weening vanity. We saw it in its germ, have watched its opening bud, till it is expanded into its blossom. The literary life of Dr L—— may well be styled the progress of vanity: the termination is yet to come: but we have ample materials for the subject.” See Monthly Review, of July, and Critical Review, of Sept. 1802, and Feb. 1803.

[107]

They’ll fall before great doctor Lettsom.

I resolved to recommend your arranging yourselves under the banners of this Leviathan of the Galenical throng, from the moment I first heard of his noble and spirited sally against the tractors. Disdaining the wretched trammels of why and wherefore, and without assigning those paltry trifles, called reasons, for his opinions, on the merits of Perkinism, our intrepid commander determined to extirpate it root and branch, with his simple ipse dixit. This is what we ought to expect from a hero of such prowess. See how well he manages these metallic makers of mischief! In a eulogium (a very agreeable thing to a modest man during his life time) on his friend Dr Haygarth, contained in the work which those wicked reviewers above mentioned have treated so irreverently, he mentions (page 277) the “important object,” which Dr Haygarth has so “happily effected.” This is “arresting and subduing two poisons, the most fatal to the human race (fever and small-pox) and unveiling imposture, clothed in the meretricious garb of bold quackery:” a note on the word “imposture,” in the margin says, “Experiments on metallic tractors.” Now, unless I can borrow the pen of the learned doctor, dipped in “ETHEREAL and indelible ink,” and a whole literary apparatus in proportion, I shall never be able to express how much I admire the matter above quoted, on account of the important intelligence therein contained. Before Dr L. asserted it, I dare say not an individual in the kingdom knew that Dr Haygarth had “effected” such an “important object,” that fever and small-pox were subdued, altogether extinct, despoiled of that venom which has hitherto “brought death into the world,” and so much wo. But true it is, they are quite extirpated, and all this by Dr Haygarth!! One cannot but exclaim against the perverseness of those members of parliament, who, regardless of this news from Dr L. voted a reward to Dr Jenner for his services in subduing the small-pox, and to Dr Smith, for his discoveries in subduing contagious fevers. In short, I am almost ready to enforce the charge of ignorance against my brethren in the profession; for I have not yet met with one possessed of sufficient penetration to see, that neither fever nor small-pox “has a local habitation and a name among us,” and that they have been both “subdued,” and all this “effected,” by Dr Haygarth!

[108]

Prepare the batteries of thy journal.

Here I can, with certainty, calculate on the most powerful co-operation. This——, what shall I call it? This official Gazette of the profession—this Medico-Chymico-Comico-Repository, for the effusions of self-puffers, prescribing rules and recipes,

this powerful instrument of offensive and defensive warfare, has ever, with becoming vigilance, guarded its post against Perkinean invaders, and suffered no occasion to pass without a squirt of the Gallic acid of satire, when there was deemed a possibility of blackening the common enemy.

I can never sufficiently express my approbation of the Carthagenian cunning with which this journal has been conducted. Dr B. professing great impartiality, in an early number, (see vol. ii. p. 85) invited communications on the subject of the tractors. Subsequent management evidently showed a slight omission in the doctor’s notice, and that he meant communications on one side only; for he has omitted no pains to procure and publish whatsoever could be suggested against the tractors; but though reports of cases in their favor, and all the publications of the patentee have been before him, not a syllable of these was ever noticed by that gentleman; neither has it ever appeared by his journal that such facts ever existed.

[109]

By every nostrum, save thine own.

I appeal to any of my brethren who have been gratified, as I often have been, with the Demosthenes-like torrent which has been so frequently poured forth, in our medical societies, by this “child and champion” of the Galenical throng, against quackery and all its appurtenances, whether it were fair to surmise, as some unconscionable rogues have done, that Dr B. has absolutely himself become the proprietor of a quack medicine. The fire of eloquence with which Perkinism, that most atrocious kind of quackery, has been so frequently, and so effectually assailed by the learned doctor at the medical society, at Guy’s, the Lyceum Medico Londinensis, &c. &c. &c. ought to have ensured Dr B. so much of the gratitude of the profession, that, although he should himself choose to become one of the most arrant quacks in the kingdom, he might depend on your support of his reputation, and your exertions to uphold him. No subsequent apostacy on his part, I maintain, will justify a dereliction of him.

Recal to your recollection, gentlemen, the denunciations he has so often made against every medical practitioner who should presume, either directly or indirectly, to offer any patronage to remedies which bore even the most distant resemblance to a nostrum. How often have the walls of the medical theatres of Saint Thomas’s hospital, and Windmill street, echoed loud responses to his declamations against the varlets, who should dare to recommend means, in the profits of the consumption of which the whole profession could not participate? How often have you received his invitations to send him your effusions and declamations against quackery, to receive an efficient publication in his journal? and what number of that journal has appeared without performing his promise, by honoring those effusions with a place in its immortal pages?

Lest even these most important considerations should still find you inexorable, I trust I can show, by examining his conduct in regard to the quack medicine in question, that, if it be not praise-worthy, it is, at least, defensible.

The title of the nostrum which has had the assistance of Dr B. in being introduced to the notice of a grateful public, is “A NEW MEDICINE FOR THE GOUT.” The pretended discoverer of this specific is, for very commendable, or, which is the same thing, very prudent reasons, kept behind the curtain. I wish, however, to express my utter disbelief that either Dr Brodum or Dr Solomon is the happy mortal, however similar the style of the pamphlet, announcing this new medicine, may be to their erudite writings, and the pretensions of the said medicine to “balms of Gilead” and to “nervous cordials.”

[110]

’Gainst Belgraves, Colquhouns, Wilberforces!

What business had these fellows to intrude their noses into the concerns of the Westminster infirmary? Brother B. had an undoubted right to manage, or mismanage, the funds of a medical institution, as best suited his own convenience, without their troublesome interference.

[111]

All in a chariot take an airing.

I hereby enter a protest against any one of my commentators, whether he be Vanscanderdigindich the elder, or Hansvanshognosuch, his cousin German (two Dutch geniuses, who have promised to furnish the next edition of this my pithy poem with a whole ass-load of annotations) or any other gentlemen critics or reviewers of equal profoundity, presuming to intimate, that I intend, by this passage, the smallest disrespect to your pedestrian physicians. Far from that; I know that many good and great men (like myself for example) cannot even pay a shilling for hackney-coach hire. No, gentlemen; I have two great objects in view, to wit:

1. To encourage my brother B—to persevere in his laudable attempt to kick Perkinism back to the country whence it originated, by reminding him, that if the feat were once performed, he might, perhaps, soon afford the expense of a chariot to transport, in a respectable manner, all that wig, without laying the entire burden on the curious sconce it now envelopes.

2. To remind brother B—, and the profession in general, how much more execution may be done by a charioteer than by a pedestrian physician.

Although great men frequently differ, I am happy to find Mr Addison’s opinion and mine, in this particular, perfectly consentaneous.

“This body of men,” says he, speaking of physicians in our own country, “may be described like the British army in Cæsar’s time. Some slay in chariots, and some on foot. If the infantry do less execution than the charioteers, it is because they cannot be carried, so soon, into all parts of the town, and despatch so much business in so short a time.” Spectator, No. 21.

Not an individual, I will venture to assert, who knows my brother B—, but must feel the really urgent necessity of elevating him, as soon as possible, from le pave and giving those talents their full swing. Then, indeed, soon might our charioteer justly boast—

[112]

From Brodum down to gaseous Thornton.

I am fully sensible that many of my brethren, of less discernment than myself, would have assigned this famous little genius a rank on the empirical list even above Dr Brodum. Making puffing their criterion, they will argue that those acute half-guinea paragraphs which we occasionally see at the fag end of the Times and other morning papers, respecting that “very learned physician,”—his “great discoveries, and improvements in the medical application of the gases,”—his “grand national and botanical work,” and fifty others of the same strain, asserting the high claims of this airy writer on the gratitude of the public, are incontestable proofs of his superior merits in the puffing department, which, say they, are some of the most necessary ingredients in the formation of a charlatan. All this is specious reasoning; but I trust I shall show its fallacy. Pre-eminence, in my opinion, must be founded on some intrinsic excellence, original and independent of adventitious circumstances. If we closely examine the merits of this candidate, we shall find that there can be no great claim on this score. Let any man enjoy the faculties and advantages of a general dealer in the airs, who must of course have puffs of all descriptions at hand; and where is the merit of occasionally letting off one?

If there be anything like originality in this industrious little philosopher, and for the invention of which I should be inclined to allow him the credit of ingenuity, it consists in his meritometer, which proposes to measure the merits of his fellow creatures by the degree of faith they can afford to bestow on the infallibility of his gases as a panacea. See his plan of this instrument, or rather the deductions drawn from his trials of it, in his large five volume compilation of “Extracts,” vol. i. page 459. From this scale it appears, that of one thousand of mankind nine hundred and ninety-nine are either fools or knaves, as that proportion places no confidence in the efficacy of his catholicon. I hope, therefore, after the good reasons here assigned for my conduct, I shall not be suspected of partiality to Dr Brodum in retaining him at the head of the quacks, nor ill will to Dr T. for not calling him up higher on the list.

[113]

The Thalaba of English metre.

Mr Southey, in his work with the title of “Thalaba or the Destroyer,” has given us a fine example of a pleasing dreadful performance, which is neither prose, rhyme, nor reason. Indeed, nothing but the inspiration of the gas which we have seen him inhale in the first canto, could have generated the following effusions.

Again he towers in Book v.

Now, if in this age of turmoils your worships should have occasion to educate a school of assassins, to be employed as Talleyrand employs his agents, for the purpose of promoting modern philanthropy and French projects of universal empire, I should advise you to prepare them intellectual food from such descriptions as we have quoted above. By accustoming your pupils to meditate on such horrible descriptions you will soon enable them to inflict without compunction or remorse, sufferings like those, which they have been in the habit of contemplating.

We are sorry to see, however, that our friend, Dr Darwin, has been pleased to express his disapprobation of this species of the terrible in style, without which your small poets can never become conspicuous. We shall, however, quote one of his sentiments on the subject merely to let the world know that we great wits do not always tally upon every point.

The doctor tells us in his Botanic Garden, p. 115, that there is a “line of boundary between the tragic and the horrid; which line, however, will veer a little this way or that, according to the prevailing manners of the age or country, and the peculiar association of ideas, or idiosyncrasy of mind, of individuals.”

Now I am apprehensive that doctor Darwin would have adjudged the greater part of Mr Southey’s sublimity to be of the “horrid” rather than the tragic or sublime kind. Such an opinion, however, would not only greatly tarnish the reputation of the critic who should venture to pronounce it, but would entirely put down many pretty good poets, who, as the Edinburgh reviewers say, must have a “qu’il mourut,” and a “let there be light” in every line; and all their characters must be in agonies and ecstacies, from their entrance to their exit.[G]

Thalaba, having leaped into a “little car” which appears to have been drawn by “four living pinions, headless, bodyless, sprung from one stem that branched below, in four down arching limbs, and clenched the carrings endlong and aside, with claws of griffin grasp;”

There’s the bathos to perfection! Now, if we could in any way have prevailed on Mr Southey to have stopped this side of the centre of gravity, we should have been happy to have hired his “car” for this our dreadful rencontre. But as it appears that the Domdaniel cave soon after fell in, I fancy it would cost more to dig out this vehicle than to get Mr Southey to make us a new one.

[114]

Adown through vast Domdaniel cares.

That is, as Southey says, through the Domdaniel caves, “at the roots of the ocean.”

[115]

To monsieur Mahomet’s paradise.

[116]

Now rant! rave! roar! and rend! and rattle.

I Christopher Caustic, censured by critics, for my apt alliterations, though artfully allied, yet presume it is policy for a pennyless poet to polish his puny lays to such a pitch of perfection, that posterity may please to place the pithy production paramount to the peaked point of the pinnicle of Pierian Parnassus.

[117]

Drives, Jehu-like, Death’s iron wagon!!

A poet of less judgment than myself would have seated Mars in the chariot of Victory, a Vauxhall car, or some other flimsy vehicle of that kind, which would be sure to be dashed to pieces in a conflict like this in which we are at present engaged. The carriage here introduced was made by Vulcan, in his best style of workmanship, for the express purpose of this attack, and in point of strength and size, bears no more proportion to the chariot commonly used by the god of war, than one of those huge broad-wheeled Manchester wagons to the little whalebone thingamy which the duke of Queensbury ran at New Market.

[118]

Rend the blue “blanket” of the skies.

This is the same “blanket” which Mr Canning said was “wet” when he exhibited it in the House of Commons. Since his use of it on that occasion it has been so frequently wrung by the wits, that it has now become a perfectly dry and almost thread-bare article.

[119]

And round the Blue Ridge make all rattle.

Volney informs us in his View that the Alleghany mountain is the frontier on which the south-west and north-west winds in America contend; and that he beheld a spectacle of that kind at Rockfish Gap, on the Blue Ridge. See American edition, page 148.

[120]

Huge, hissing hot, and hard as granite.

It is to me a matter of doubt whether your worships are not absolutely ignorant of the causes and effects of the wonderful phenomena to which we now allude. But if you will please to take with us a stand for observation, exactly at the centre of gravity between the earth and the moon, and look about you with the eyes of great philosophers you will perceive what is well worth a world of admiration.

You will perceive that what is vulgarly called the man in the moon is a prodigious volcano, in size much superior to any on our globe, and that this volcano is continually emitting rocks, which ever and anon are thrown beyond the sphere of the moon’s attraction, and of course make their way down upon us.

You will likewise find, by turning to the second volume of the Philadelphia Literary Magazine, page 389, an account of above thirty different showers of stones, some of which have weighed not less than 300 pounds. And you will ascertain that there has been a great diversity of opinions among philosophers respecting the origin of these prodigies. Some have believed them to be thrown from some neighboring volcano. Some have thought them to have been wafted about by hurricanes. Others have supposed them to have been concretions formed in the atmosphere. Some have thought them to be masses which were detached from the planets at the time of the formation; and that they have been floating about in infinite space till they met with our earth, which became to them a new centre of gravity.

But the truth is, as you may see through any common optical tube, from the situation to which I have just had the honor to conduct you, that these masses of matter are the product of lunar volcanos. Here we have a cause adequate to the effect, as I shall make evident in the following few words.

A lunar volcano similar to those on our planet would project bodies much further from the moon than they would be thrown by the same force from Etna or Vesuvius; for,

1. It is granted by great philosophers, such as ourself and Dr Darwin, that the moon has no atmosphere; of consequence, a body exploded from the moon would meet with no resistance excepting from the power of gravitation. Dr Darwin informs us, Botanic Garden, canto ii. “If the moon had no atmosphere at the time of its elevation from the earth; or if its atmosphere was afterwards stolen from it by the earth’s attraction, the water on the moon would rise quickly into vapor; and the cold produced by a certain quantity of this evaporation would congeal the remainder of it. Hence it is not probable that the moon is at present inhabited; but as it seems to have suffered and to continue to suffer much by volcanos, a sufficient quantity of air may in process of time be generated to produce an atmosphere, which may prevent its heat from so easily escaping, and its water from so easily evaporating, and thence become fit for the production of vegetables and animals.

“That the moon possesses little or no atmosphere is deduced from the undiminished lustre of the stars at the instant when they emerge from behind her disk. That the ocean of the moon is frozen is confirmed from there being no appearance of lunar tides,” &c.

2. Bodies on the moon possess much less gravity in proportion to their quantity of matter than bodies on the surface of the earth; for matter is attracted by the earth and moon, respectively, in proportion to the quantity of matter which each contains. It follows that a comparatively slight impulse, communicated to a body on the moon’s surface, would be sufficient to counteract its attraction towards the moon, and if it were propelled towards the earth it might come within its attraction, and would of course make its way to our planet.

Thus it appears very evident, even to persons of your worships’ ordinary penetration, that these wonderful showers of stones are of lunar origin.

[121]

For doctor Tasker to descant on.

I feel a very great solicitude to mould and modify every part and parcel of this performance according to rules and regulations of the best master-builders of epic poems, tragedies, and other great things of that kind. The judicious critic will perceive that all my wounds are inflicted with anatomical accuracy, and I have no doubt but my friend Dr Haygarth will do himself the honor to write a treatise upon this subject, and tell the world with what terrible propriety we have hewed and hacked our opponents in the field of battle. The reverend William Tasker, A. B. has furnished a model of this species of criticism in A Series of Letters, respecting “The Anatomical Knowledge of Homer,” &c. Dr Haygarth I expect will prove that the “death wounds” of Sarpedon, Hector, Ulysses’ dog, &c. as displayed in the treatise of Dr Tasker, were mere flea bites compared with these of Dr Caustic.

[122]

From where the head to where the tail is.

Or more correctly where the tail was. Lord Monboddo tells us that men, as well as monkies, were formerly dignified with long tails protruding from the place where (according to Butler) honor is lodged. Philosophers and antiquaries had never been able to discover how man became divested of this ornament, till my friend, Dr Anderson, furnished a clue to the mystery. From this discovery I am led to suppose that your antediluvian bucks began the practice of CUR-tail-ing these excrescences for gentility’s sake, and what was at first artificial became in due time natural, till, at length, your right tippies, as in modern times, were entirely disencumbered of that monkey-like appendage; but our Bond-street loungers, although divested of that exterior mark of the monkey, with a laudable desire to prevent the intentions of Nature from being defeated, have adopted all the ourang-outang-ical airs which she originally designed should discriminate that species of animals from man.

[123]

With burning lapis infernalis.

The use of this caustic and other escharotics on this momentous occasion reminds me of an important era in my life, a succinct biographical sketch of which I shall shortly publish, in nineteen volumes folio; a work which, in point of size, erudition, and interesting anecdote, will be immensely preferable to the voluminous production of lord Orford.

The event in question was of the greater consequence, as it gave rise to the present family name of “Caustic.”

Just thirty-two years since, from the fourteenth day of last July, while I was prosecuting some of my chymical researches, my eldest son Tom, a burly-faced boy, since killed in a duel with a hot-headed Irish gentleman, overturned a bench on which were placed seven carboys full of acids, alkalies, &c. and broke them into inch pieces. The consequences of this accident may be more easily conceived than described. The whole neighborhood was alarmed, and many most terribly causticized in endeavoring to extinguish the conflagration which ensued. In the consternation, and amid the exertions to subdue it, some one cried out that Dr Crichton (for such was my former name, being the lineal descendant from the celebrated “admirable Crichton”) is fairly a Dr Caustic.

Thus began my honorary name, of which, as it is scientific, I am not a little proud, especially as it was acquired by virtue of an explosion, similar to that which gave the honorary appellation of Bronte to my friend, viscount Nelson of the Nile. For further particulars respecting this important event, you will please to inquire at the Herald’s college, where, I dare say, “garter principal king at arms,” sir Isaac Heard, knt. has done me the justice to register the occurrence. Instead of lions, bulls, boars, camels, elephants, and such insignificant animalculæ, my shield is decorated with insignia more appropriate to my great pretensions. On the left are seen broken carboys couchant, implying that the secrets of science lie prostrate before me. On the right are fumes rampant, indicative of my discoveries, which soar above those of all other pretenders. In the centre are nine hedgehogs, with quills, stickant, a happy emblem of my peaceable disposition.

My motto, which I trust sir Isaac has also registered, is worthy of notice. Dr Darwin was much pleased with it, and, desirous to emulate my fame in the art of motto making, made “OMNIA E CONCHIS.” But your worships will perceive that the doctor’s motto bears no comparison with mine, in point of erudition; as I prove myself versed in three languages; whereas he can boast of only one. Here it comes.

This, my beautiful and appropriate motto, for the sake of accommodating those among your worships, who are not versed in the lore of Greece and Rome, and cannot afford to subsidize men of erudition to officiate for you in that department of science, I shall render into our vernacular idiom, as follows:

Lest the more critical and polite reader should complain, that in order to let myself down to the level of your worshipful capacities, I have anglicized my sublime motto in too vulgar and colloquial a style, I shall take the liberty, politely, to parodize thereon, and, as lord Bacon says, “to bring it home to men’s business and bosoms;” that is, to make the application to that particular kind of gentry, against whom my hedgehog quills, aforesaid, are pointed in terrorem.

[124]

Thus monsieur Satan, was quite merry.

So said Milton, Paradise Lost, B. vi. where the hero of the poem (whom I would propose as a model for your worships’ imitation on all occasions) and his merry companions “in gamesome mood stand scoffing,” and “quips cranks,” powder, grape shot, puns, blunderbuss, jokes, and cannon-balls, flash, roar, and bellow in concert.

But I am sure that every candid critic will be disposed to acknowledge that neither Homer nor Milton ever described a battle, fraught with such sublime images and similes, as this in which we are so desperately engaged.

[125] The above ode was written, set to music, and sung on a public occasion in Rutland, Vermont, July, 1798. At that time the armament, which afterwards sailed to Egypt, under Buonaparte, lay at Toulon: its destination was not known in America, but many supposed that it was intended to waft the blessings of French liberty to the United States.

[126] This ode was written to the music of an anthem, previously composed for other words, by Oliver Holden, Esq. Charlestown, Mass., a gentleman eminent for his musical talents, and sung during divine service, at the anniversary of Vermont General Election.

[127] There is an inflated species of simplicity, consisting of exaggerations of thought expressed by colloquial barbarisms, mixed with occasional pomposity of diction, which it is the object of the above to ridicule. The measure is after the model of “Thalaba;” but rhyme is added, as Butler says, merely by way of rudder to the verses.

[128] Killington Peak. The summit of the Green Mountains, in Vermont, is so called.

[129] Written for the occasion, and sung in New York, July the fourth, 1805.

[130] Mud-pout and sucker are two kinds of fishes of little value, common enough in muddy streams. The otter pursues these with peculiar avidity.

[131] Wickapy is the popular name for a shrub, which is remarkably flexible.

[132] Virgil says “acquirit,” which not rhyming we use a substitute;

[133] Sung at the Anniversary of the Mass. Hort. Society, Sept. 10, 1830.

[134] Hon. Elias Phinney.

[135] The lady, to whom these lines were addressed, had been offended at the insolence of the character who sat as the original for our picture.

[A] We preferred whales both for the docility and the rhyme’s sake.

[B] “Divine Nonsensia.”

[C] And therefore the writer of the article “Earth,” in the Encyclopedia Britannica, is wrong in attempting to overturn this fine fabric of philosophy, by making it appear that metals, minerals, fossils, &c. are continually forming by accretion, &c. on the earth’s surface. Indeed, that writer has laid a heavy hand on all the theories of our modern earthmongers.

[D] I am afraid, after all, this would turn out but a bubble.

[E]Now, if it should happen that the comparative levity of air consists in the repellant powers of its particles, and those bodies which have the greatest cohesion are most prone to gravitate, there “needs some conjuror to tell us,” what should hinder bodies of greater specific gravity from riddling down between those particles of air. No man but Dr Franklin could have caught the fugitive air under the shell of the first earth, and pressed it till it became heavier than gold by a hurly-burly of elements “mixed in confusion.”

[F] The “Monthly Reviewers” of our late edition of Tractoration, would have it that OURSELF was a Scotchman “frae the north,” &c. Now here’s a yankee phrase, merely to convince you that they were out in their conjectures.

[G] See Edinburgh Review of Southey’s Thalaba, October, 1802.