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which shall first happen: or sooner, if the parliament shall judge it needful, and that it may be done without hindrance to the carrying on the publick affairs and trade of these nations: and that the same may have continuance, and be in force, until the said bills shall be fully paid off, and no longer.

6. And for the better appropriating and securing these funds, and the rents, revenues, and profits thereof, to the ends and uses aforesaid: that, by the said act of parliament, it may be made highly criminal, in all and singular person and persons respectively, who shall be concerned, in the levying, raising, receiving, disposing, and paying the same, or any part thereof, to pay, or dispose, the monies that shall be by this act, or by any of these funds raised, to any other use, intent, or purpose whatsoever, than to, and for the paying off the said bills of credit. And that no warrant or order, shall be issued, or if issued, shall be obeyed by the commissioners, or other persons, that shall be intrusted with the charge and care hereof, to any other use or uses whatsoever.

7. And that the way and manner, time and place, order and course of paying thereof, as also the persons to be employed and used herein, be settled by act of this present parliament, so as the said bills may be satisfied, and paid accordingly, without fees, &c. All which, notwithstanding,

Is humbly submitted,

By the Proposer.

Quod omnes tractat ab omnibus tractari debet.

THE HONOUR OF THE GOUT:

OR,

A RATIONAL DISCOURSE,

Demonstrating, that the Gout is one of the greatest Blessings which can befal mortal Man; that all Gentlemen, who are weary of it, are their own Enemies; that those Practitioners, who offer at the Cure, are the vainest and most mischievous Cheats in Nature. By Way of Letter to an eminent Citizen, wrote in the Heat of a violent Paroxysm, and now published for the common Good. By Philander Misaurus. Duodecimo, containing sixtyseven Pages; printed at London, in 1699.

THE PUBLISHER TO THE READER.

This piece, which I present to you, as appears from many passages in it, was wrote towards the beginning of the reign of King

William; whether or no the author be living, I cannot satisfy you; but this I will engage: greater profit, and more agreeable entertainment, were never purchased of a bookseller cheaper.

ADVERTISEMENT.

The author is of opinion, that some epistles dedicatory would do best, standing after the pamphlet; therefore, good reader, pass on, and expect mine in its proper place.

I

SIR,

OWE you a greater observance, more profound respects, and hearty thanks, for favours to which I had not merit to pretend, than I am able to express, should I make words and phrase my study; but I am not like to do that at present; for you have used me so of late, that you tempt me to think you are going to put as much despight in one scale, as ever you put obligation into the other. Why! Sir, I am informed, that your worship, not having a right sense of things, nor the fear of God before your eyes, should, to the disgrace of your own virtue, give your tongue the liberty, in an open coffee-house, to speak ill of the gout. Of the gout, Sir! which if you look on as a disease, you ought to welcome, as the most useful and necessary thing that could have happened to you; but, if you consider it as becomes you, then, with me, you must reverence it as a power divine,

On whose sacred internodial altars I,

Each spring and fall, at least, will sacrifice
Morbifick, painful loads of matter tartarous,
With recrements of nervous juice impregnate.

Would you yourself, Sir, patiently endure the honour of our great master, our rightful and lawful king, to be contemptuously reflected on by ever a recreant piece of consciencious priestcraft *, that infests the town? Then, why should not I be concerned for the honour of my great master, the gout? Who claims not, it is true, the power, he exercises over me, by any hereditary pretence, but from an origin altogether as sacred and indisputable, viz. some voluntary acts and deeds of my own. Yet you could say, that, when the Almighty God had, out of rude chaos, built this goodly frame of nature, which we see, and formed his noble creature, man; he indulged the devil to create some one thing, and his damned envy gave being to the gout. Now I am confident, Sir, and have great authorities for it, that, if the devil ever created any thing, it was the doctor, of whom, since you have made so much use, I know not, but it may be rationally inferred, that you have dealt with the devil. The gout, Sir, whether you know it, or no, was postnate to the creation, and younger, something, than the fall of man; who having incurred the sentence of death, the friendly Alluding to Bishop Burnet's unbecoming insinuation against King William the

Third.

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gout was sent in mercy, down from heaven, to lengthen wasting life. By my consent, you should never have the gout, who have no more consideration in you, than to blaspheme it.

I always took your worship for a person the most accomplished our city has ever bred. I imagined, that you thoroughly understood most things; but it could never enter into my head, that you should fall into so profane an error, as to think, into so rash a practice, as to speak ill of the gout. But, because my soul has been full of humble deference to your worship, I will be at some pains to recover you to your right mind, and a due veneration of that friendly dæmon, the gout. For, though you may value yourself, and reckon, that no girding satyrist can take up the old proverb against you, and say, that you are afraid of your friends, when there is none near you; yet, what is worse, they may reproach you with this disgraceful truth, you are afraid of your best friend, when he kisses your very feet.

Now, upon this subject, having no need to use the inveigling arts of oratory, I shall not with tropes and metaphors, with flourishes and amusements of insinuating words, seek to divert your mind, and cheat your judgment; but, to make my work the shorter, and do it effectually, press you with plain demonstration. Your error, Sir, was this: that the devil created the gout. I prove he did not. You know, Sir, that the man of sin, the son of perdition, best known by the name of Antichrist, is the Pope. You must not doubt of this; for, till the days of that excellent prelate, Archbishop Laud, the whole stream of Protestant interpreters gave it so. A learned chaplain of his has put that character upon the Grand Seignior; and a famous annotator has taught our church to split antichrist into Simon Magus and his Gnostick followers. I must confess, I have a sort of respect to these authorities; but the body of modern Dissenters, and the general agreement of interpreters, Whig and Tory, in the age before, weighs them down. Take in, then, the lay-mobility of the nation, who should know something, but are confident of nothing more, than that Antichrist is the Pope; and your worship will agree with me, that that is the plain truth of the matter. By the way, I will observe one thing, which will not trouble my demonstration, but let your worship see, how ready I am to allow you, in your speculation, all that can reasonably be desired. A celebrated author notes, that the ancients described Antichrist by the phrase of apróron TE Zarava, the first-born of the devil. Supposing now, that the devil created something, as you contend, you see, it could not be the gout; at least, not if you will be judged by the fathers; but rather Antichrist, or the Pope. I desire your worship to consider next, that you shall not read, in Platina, Onuphrius, or any later Antichristian biographer, that ever fetid toe of Pope was visited with the beneficial gout. But, had so great a blessing been created by the devil, as you fondly imagine, the devil had, for certain, bestowed it on his first-born, the Pope: nay, and then too, instead of the filthy scrutiny, through the porphyry chair, for old and wasted

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testicles, the deacon had only pulled off the stocking of the elect, and the ratificatory report had been, Dominus noster Papa habet podagram*. In short, Sir, Antichrist, or the Pope (for they are one and the same first-born of the devil, according to the ancients,) being never favoured with the gout, it is plain, that the devil did not create it; og da dega, which was the thing to be demonstrated. Having thus, Sir, utterly confounded your error, my next labour shall be, to instruct you in a sounder persuasion. sent, in mercy, down from heaven, to lengthen wasting life. The gout was

The seat of this friendly daemon, by whom every afflicted man receives a thousand times more benefit, than ever Socrates by his ; his seat, I say, is in the nervous parts. He commonly visits the internodia of the bones of the feet; sometimes the hip, the knee, the elbow, shoulder, wrist, and ancle. But, to prove its divine original, I will proceed methodically, and, from his lowest commendations, ascend, by six just steps, or degrees, till I bave raised him above the stars, and entered him among the celestial spirits ; to whom, Sir, you will then be tempted to offer up your oraisons, in the prescribed form, at the end of an old manuscript missal, communicated to me by a learned antiquary, a great collector of those rarities. The form is this: Blessed gout, most desirable gout, sovereign antidote of murdering maladies, powerful corrector of intemperance, deign to visit me with thy purging fires, and throw off the tophous injury, which I may have suffered by wine and wit, too hard for the virtue of a devotee upon a holy festival; but fail not thy humble supplicant, who needs thy friendly help to keep his tottering tenement in order; fail him not, every vernal and autumnal æquinox.'

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I know, some precise doctors are against all invocation of saints. At present I shall not dispute with them; but they must grant mè, that there is more to be said in justification of such a prayer to the gout, than can be said for the offices directed to any other saints, not excepting the virgin. For I defy their worshipers to prove, that there has been the tithe of so much good done by them all, as, I shall prove, has been done by the beneficial gout. I begin at the lowest step, and note,

First, the gout gives a man pain without danger.

It is possible, I confess, that a sick man, if he were directly asked to declare his sense of the matter, might refuse to acknowledge the benefit of pain without danger; for sickness and peevishness commonly go together. But mind his discourse at another time, when he talks from the heart, and is not upon his guard: then, O then, pain without danger is a blessed thing. For instance, Sffering under a painful threatening distemper, what is his first question to the physician, but this? Doctor, pray be plain with me, and let me truly know what I am to expect, don't flatter a sick man, but tell me, am I like to recover, or no? That pain, you see,

--

* Our Lord the Pope has got the gont.

which he suffers, does not at all trouble him; he is only afraid he shall die; secure him against that danger, and all is well with him: cut, slash, burn, no pain is grievous, if it promise to set us out of the danger of death.

When the other doctor comes, the physician of the soul I mean, whose coming bodes no good to the body, he tells the decumbent a long story of the pains and misery of life, in order to make his Nunc dimittis go down the easier; but that method seldom takes, for not one of a hundred is so bad, but he is content to live, and put the rest to the venture. The fear of death is generally more grievous, than all the cruel pains of a wretched life. But, since we must have pain while we live, give me the pain of the gout, which has no danger attending. Here some malevolent adversary may importunately object, did ever any man die of the gout? To this I answer, 1. I have not yet affirmed, that the gout can make a man immortal, though I will boldly say thus much, it very often keeps a man alive till all his friends are weary of him. But, 2. Should I venture to say, that the gout has in itself the power to make a man immortal; it ought not to seem so very strange, all things being considered. If that be true, which some authors write of the noble Paracelsus, he had the secret to make a man immortal, and I would not say he lyed, though himself died about forty; for, perhaps, he did not like his company; but it must have been by way of his discovery to give any man the gout when he pleased; in that I am positive. Here the objector will scornfully put me in mind, that gouty persons escape death no more than other men; which is very true, but that's because men are fools, and don't know when they are safe. They must be curing the gout, forsooth, and, to that end, they deal with the doctor, i. e. with the factor of death, the emissary of hell, the purveyor of the grave, damned alchymist, good at calcining nothing but living bodies into dust and ashes. Let every one bear his own burthen; the gout has nothing to do with the carnage of the doctor. All, that can be rationally said against the gout, is, that it does not actually preserve man, in spight of their own folly, and the doctor's ignorance: and yet there is the right honourable Sir R. H. the gout is so salutary to him, that two Swiss doctors can't dispatch him. What would a certain lord give, that those two coagulating spirits could remove his honour's gout; but, say I, Gout, hold thy own;' for earth has more need of the cripple, than heaven of the saint. And now, Sir, let me tell you a story, the famous Willis shall be my voucher, who dissected the body of the reverend, learned, and pious Doctor Hammond, killed purely by his friend, who, unhappily, taught him a medicine to cure the gout; upon the cessation of that medicine, the doctor's old nephritic pains returned, and in a fortnight dispatched him.

Therefore, for your own, for your lady's, and for your childrens sake, Sir, welcome the gout to your house, and shut all your doors against the physician, I'll warrant you for upwards a hundred. Lord! how glad shall I be, to see them pick chalk-stones out of

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