180 'MY POVERTY BUT NOT MY WILL CONSENTS?

Of Death and Famine! thou anatomy

Of a starved pilchard!"

Or we might recall Virgil's image-macie confecta suprema forma viri, miserandaque cultu.

A separate section might be made up of illustrations of the apothecary's plea, that to the sale of poison his poverty and not his will consented. Twice in the Brussels legend of the desecrated Host in the synagogue, are the words used by our Christian historian of the Jews, -applied first to John of Louvain, "whose poverty could not resist the bribe of sixty golden coins" for stealing the pix, with its sacred contents, from the Chapel of St. Catharine; and again to the woman selected by the Jews to convey their treasure to Cologne, whose " 'poverty but not her will consented." It is virtually, if not verbally, the plea of Milton's "subtle fiend" himself, where he speaks of being urged hard

"with doings, which not will

But misery hath wrested from me."

A quasi-apologist for Marat-that sometime practising apothecary or starved surgeon, starved surgeon, who exchanged retail practice for wholesale, and the lancet for the guillotine -has pronounced him to be such a man as the apothecary of Mantua would have become in a revolution; only Marat, instead of dealing out small doses of death to lovesick tailors and world-wearied seamstresses, cried out for eighty thousand heads. "Let us pity this poor vial of prussic acid," urges the special pleader, on the ground that Shakspeare had a decided penchant for the caitiff wretch he so graphically paints, and whose shop he has advertised to the ends of the earth.

Things are nearing the bitter end with Dickens's Tale of Two Cities, when Sydney Carton stops in the middle of a Paris street by night, under a glimmering lamp, and writes with his pencil on a scrap of paper. Then traversing, with the decided step of one who remembers the way well, several dark and dirty thoroughfares, he stops at a chemist's shop which the owner is closing with his own hands: a small, dim, crooked shop, kept in a squalid quarter by a small

'A BEGGARLY ACCOUNT OF EMPTY BOXES?

181

dim, crooked man.

Confronting him at his counter, Carton

lays the scrap of paper before him. "Whew!' the chemist

Hi! hi! hi!' Sydney chemist said, 'For you,

whistled softly, as he read it. Carton took no heed, and the citizen?' 'For me.'" And the black business is done accordingly. Paris is not Mantua, nor is Sydney Carton a Romeo; but there is a Juliet in this case too-and an apothecary.

The Doctor Leech of a ballad of the Ingoldsby school, but without the clear ring of Barham metal in either rhyme or reason, is a shadow of the shade in Shakspeare of the apothecary that Romeo drew, and bribed. As for said doctor's shop-window, "three globes of colour'd liquor graced its panes," and within it "shone drawers and jars, each with its classic label;

"But, as the drawers were shut, and jars opaque,

No passenger or customer was able
Whether they full or empty were to tell,

Though Doctor Leech the latter knew full well.

These, with some bullocks' bladders,

And half a dozen adders

Preserved in spirits,

Beyond their merits,

With empty phials, a prodigious host,

Were all our pharmacopolist could boast.

His fees scarce furnish'd the coarse meals he swallow'd,

Or suffer'd him to clothe his bony haunches

In decent breeches. . . . Meanest slave or poorest bard

Could scarcely hold his life on terms so hard.

Sometimes he lived on porridge make of leeks

For weeks or toasted cheese, or boil'd grey pease.

:

Nay, in extremity, he sometimes fed

For many a cheerless day on barley bread."

So again in one of Mr. Fitzgerald's fictions we have a glimpse of a dingy apothecary's shop, languid as regards business; its bottles, medicines, and apparatus showing under a delicate film of blue mould; while the dispenser himself, as seen through a dusty pane, seemed to be suffering under the same powdery mite-eaten blight. Geoffrey

Crayon's explorations in Little Britain made us acquainted with a "tall, dry old gentleman, of the name of Skryme," who kept a small apothecary's shop; a man of cadaverous countenance, full of cavities and projections; of considerable repute among old women, who deem him a kind of conjuror, because he has two or three stuffed alligators hanging over his counter, and several snakes in bottles on his shelves. But the same essay-writer's better-known Ichabod Crane, of Sleepy Hollow, in the Legend of that ilk, is a more graphic personal representative of Romeo's apothecary, as regards his lank proportions; to see whom striding along the profile of a hill on a windy day, with his clothes (too big for his shrunk shank and wasted waist) bagging and fluttering about him, was like seeing the genius of famine descending upon the earth, or some marrowless scarecrow eloped from a cornfield.

SV.

A DEADLY DOCTOR.

King Richard II., Act i., Sc. 4.

THE tidings that his uncle, old John of Gaunt, is grievous sick, suddenly taken, and hath sent post-haste, to entreat his royal nephew to visit him at Ely House, how does King Richard meet the message, and greet its import? With a heartless wish that Uncle John's doctor may be a deadly one, not a healing one; may play into the hands of death, not rescue the aged Duke out of those hands. John of Gaunt's wealth will be useful to Richard the Second. The lining of his coffers will make coats to deck the soldiers for the Irish wars. Besides, the King likes not the didactic tone, the remonstrant tendencies, of his venerable kinsman, and could well spare the counsellor, to be spared

the counsel. He will comply with the summons, and at once; but he prays God that, making haste, he may come too late. And meanwhile there is this other prayerful profanity to utter, devout in its malign aspirations :

"Now put it, Heaven, in his physician's mind,

To help him to his grave immediately."

Kings have had such doctors at command, ere now; and the physician that poisons his patient, though a monster, is not one of incredible proportions. "Would the cook were of my mind!" wishes wicked Don John of Arragon, in view of the forthcoming feast at which kinsfolk and friends of his are to assist. For cooks and physicians are exceptionally qualified, professionally, for dark work of this deadly sort; and both classes have had members amenable to inducements thus to betray their trust, and abuse their office. Was it of malice prepense that the physician of Dionysius the elder, when fevered after a debauch, and asking for a sleeping draught, gave him one from which he never woke again? Philippus is the honoured name of the good physician of Alexander, whom Parmenio alleged to have been bribed by Darius to poison him, and whom Alexander SO little mistrusted that he gave him the accusing letter to read while himself drinking off the draught that Philippus had prepared for him-the effect of which justified that magnanimous trust. Philippus was a common name among the physicians of old—but this one, of Acarnania, is remembered above the rest. Parmenio's charge against him, however, was not, on the face of it, preposterous, as physicians and physic were accounted of in those days. Nicias is the name by which we know that very different doctor (for, how doctors differ!) who went to Fabricius, the Roman consul, and offered, for a consideration, to take off his royal master by poison-that master and patron being Pyrrhus, King of Epirus. The consul indignantly scouted the offer, and denounced the traitor, who came incontinently to a bad end, but was utilized for a good one, in so far as his skin was appropriated to

cover the seat of a chair. Was it an easy one? Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown; and uneasy might well be the seat of a king with such surroundings.

Dion affirms for certain that Marcus Aurelius, though sick, was actually cut off by poison, administered by the physicians in his son's interest. Dean Merivale distrusts Dion. Libanius composed what Gibbon calls a "very weak apology" to defend his hero, the Emperor Julian, from "a very absurd charge" of poisoning his wife, and rewarding her physician with his mother's jewels. Eudemus is a typical figure in the Sejanus of Ben Jonson, a physician worthy of a province for his accommodating practices— for the potions he exhibits and the sleeping draughts (without a waking) he administers,-Jonson, as usual, working assiduously in the track of Tacitus, for this as for other particulars of his minutely historical tragedies of imperial Rome.

Charles the Bald's physician being a Jew, it was generally believed that the brevity of that imperial but inglorious reign was due to poison; in the ninth century, the Jews, educated in the Arabian universities of Spain, were no doubt, as Milman says, more advanced in medical science than any others in Europe. The great emperor, Frederick II., is said, on one occasion, to have tested (unlike Alexander) the worth of a warning letter, by sternly commanding the physician to drink half of the cup presented to him. The culprit threw himself at the emperor's feet, and, as he fell, overturned the liquor-enough of which was left, however, to be administered to some criminals; and they died in agony.'

*

History repeats itself. In Raikes's Diary for the year 1837 may be read how a scheme was then started by the chief physician of the Grand Signior at Constantinople to poison his master. The Sultan, having timely notice of the plot, pretended illness, and sent for his medical adviser to the palace, who prescribed a potion, and presented it with his own hand. The Sultan then ordered him to swallow the draught himself, which he positively declined doing. The sequel is that he "got the sack"-not in the slang English sense, but as they manage matters on the Bosphorus,-carefully sewing up the full sack first.