abroad, as to be translated into divers languages, and to gain the pub. lick approbation of some famous universities): so he makes this humble protest unto all the world, that though the design of that discourse was partly satyrical (which peradventure induced the author to shrowd it of purpose under shadows of trees; and where should satyrs be, but amongst trees?) Yet it never entered into his imagination to let fall from him the least thing that might give any offence to the high and honourable court of parliament, whereof he had the honour to be once a member, and hopes he may be thought worthy again: and, were he guilty of such an offence, or piacle, rather, he thinks he should never forgive himself, though he were appointed his own judge. If there occur any passage therein, that may admit a hard construction, let the reader observe, that the author doth not positively assert, or pass a judgment on any thing in that discourse which consists principally of concise, cursory narrations, of the choicest occurrences and criticisms of state, according as the pulse of time did beat then: and matters of state, as all other sublunary things, are subject to alterations, contingencies, and change, which makes the opinions and minds of men vary accordingly; not one amongst twenty is the same man to day as he was four years ago, in point of judgment, which turns and alters according to the circumstance and success of things: and it is a true saying, whereof we find common experience, posterior dies est prioris magister: The day following is the former day's school-master. There is another aphorism, the wisdom of one day is foolishness to another;' and it will be so as long as there is a man left in the world.

I will conclude with this modest request to that gentleman of the long robe that, having unpassionately perused what I have written in this small discourse, in penning whereof my conscience guided my quill all along as well as my hand, he would please to be so charitable and just, as to reverse that harsh sentence upon me, to be no friend to parliaments, and a malignant.

THE QUACKS ACADEMY:

OR,

THE DUNCES DIRECTORY.

A new Art to cross the old Proverb, and make a Man a Fool and Physician both at a Time..

Discovering the several Methods whereby so many ignorant Pretenders obtain

Repute and Practice.

Cur ludere nobis

Non liceat, licuit cum jugulare tibi.

With Allowance.

MART.

Quarto, containing 6 Pages, printed at London, for A. B. in MDCLXXVIII.

BEFORE we enter upon the subject matter of this sheet, we must declare, that we do except out of our design all those learned and

worthy persons, whose experience and labour, in the arts of medicine, may any way contribute to the common good of mankind, intending only to reflect on those illiterate pretenders to physick, whose practices are as well shameful as dangerous to the place they live in; of which latter sort we are about to speak.

Having observed the prodigious success of modern quackery, and that the practice of it is lately become a last shift, more common and thriving too, than selling of ale, or setting up a coffee-house: and finding still abundance of indigent idle people, that could never make their un. toward handicrafts fadge to purpose, who would be glad to exchange them for so genteel and advantageous an employ, had they but the secreet knack, whereby other bankrupts, with small pains and less parts, have in an instant raised themselves from beggary to competent estates: out of our great respect to such hearty well-willers, to secure so gainfull a science, we have thought fit to unfold the whole mystery, as it is this day practised with so much profit and applause. Draw near then with attention, all you decayed ragamuffins of the town; you by whose dulness no mechanick mystery but scorns to be mastered, whom neither sea nor gibbet will accept; we will put you in a way of feeding yourselves and the worms too. Honest, no doubt, because common and safe, for why, your miscarriages shall never be heard for the din of knells you shall occasion.- -But to deliver our documents in order:

First, to pass for current, you have no more to do but to call your. selves doctors; Pliny hath affirmed it before; and, though I neither ex. pect nor desire you should understand Latin, yet, because a scrap may do you a kindness, oue time or other, to swagger with, I will give it you in his own language:

Hac sola artium, evenit quod cuilibet se medicum dicenti facile credatur, cum sit periculum in nullo mendacio majus.

In this art alone it comes to pass, that any one, but professing himself a physician, is presently believed, though in no case the belief of a lye be more dangerous.'

I have Englished this for the benefit of those that do not understand Latin; and I have no quarrel at all against those that do.

However, in the second place, to support this title, there are several things convenient; of which some are external accoutrements, others internal qualifications.

Your outward requisites are a decent black suit, and, if your credit will stretch so far in Long-lane, a plush jacket; not a pin the worse, though threadbare as a taylor's cloke; it shews the more reverend an tiquity.

Secondly, like Mercury, you must always carry a Caduceus or conjuring japan in your hand, capped with a civet-box with which you must walk with Spanish gravity, as in deep contemplation upon an arbitrament between life and death.

Thirdly, a convenient lodging, not forgetting a hatch at the door; a chamber hung either with Dutch pictures or looking-glasses, belittered with urinals or empty gally-pots, and phials filled with tap-droppings, or fair water, coloured with Saunders. Any sexton will furnish your

window with a skull, in hope of your custom; over which hang up the skeleton of a monkey, to proclaim your skill in anatomy.

Fourthly, let your table be never without some old musty Greek or Arabick author, and the fourth book of Cornelius Agrippa's Occult Philosophy, wide open, to amuse the spectators; with half a dozen of gilt shillings, as so many guineas received that morning for fees.

Fifthly, fail not to oblige neighbouring ale-houses, to recommend you to inquirers; and hold correspondence with all the nurses and midwives near you, to applaud your skill at gossipings.

Now to your necessary qualifications, they are in general two, viz. loquacity or talkativeness and impudence.

As for the first, it is a mighty setter-off among the vulgar; be sure, therefore, you learn to pronounce oppilation and obstruction of the spleen, and schirrus of the liver, with a full mouth; at least speak hard words, though never so wretchedly misapplied, and obscure common ordinary things in terms of art (for all the use, you are to make of such terms, is the same jugglers do of hictius doctius and presto; to amuse people's brains, while you pick their pockets) if you can but get so far as to call the fit of an ague, a paroxysm, fits of the mother, hysterical passions; thunder out sympathetical and antipathetical cures; prate of the mechanism of nature, though you know no more of it than a plough. man does of clock-work; tell them of appeasing the irritated, archaical, microcosmical monarch; increasing the radical moisture, and relieving all the powers, vital, natural, and animal; the admiring patient shall certainly cry you up for a great schollard, provided always your nonsense be fluent, and mixed with a disparagement of the College, graduated doctors, and book-learned physicians; against whom you must ever bring in your high and mighty word experience.

But since every man is not endued with the gift of tatling, and that it is fit you should learn, like a Dutchman, to sail with every wind; if niggardly nature, or more penurious education, have not afforded you a tongue well hung, make a virtue of necessity; look grave and big, decline all discourse, especially if ingenious men be by; tell them diseases are not to be frighted away with words; that you do not come to talk but to cure, &c. This will at once conceal your ignorance from the judicious, and increase your esteem for a notable reserved pretty fellow with others: if any ask the cause of their distempers, or reason of your prescriptions, satisfy them both by producing a list of your mighty cures; wherein, if one half be false and the other hired, there is no great dan ger: for he must be a strange inquisitive infidel, that will not rather believe them, than give himself the trouble of disproving them--which brings me to the second property, viz.

A convenient audacity. There is nothing more necessary, nothing more advantageous. Make people believe that no pitched field ever slew or wounded half so many as you have recovered; that you have made death retreat, where nature was more fiercely beleaguered than ever was Stetin, and disappointed him of more bits than civil or foreign wars have furnished him with these forty years; that you have even beckoned souls back again, that have been some leagues onwards their journey from their bodies; boast the wonders you have done at Leyden

and Hamburgh, the Lazaretto at Venice, and the Maison de Dieu at Paris; that your closets are immortality-offices, and that you can let leases of lives of a larger date than Popish indulgences; pretend to the cure of all diseases, especially such as are incurable; and to know which are most in season, consult the bills of mortality, and next week vary your bill accordingly.

In particular, since the whole art of physick consists in the diagnosticks, prognosticks, and therapeuticks; for the first two you must either pretend to be waterologers; or (which is more abstruse and modish) ass-trologers, or piss-prophets, or star-wizards; either way will do well enough, and, to speak truth, are much of a certainty; in both there is necessary a previous pumping, by apt and wary questions, and their an swers, handsomely turned into other words, will extremely gratify the patient or querent. If you practise by the urinal, though it is as like to discover the colour of a sick man's cloaths as his infirmities: yet a thousand to one, but with discreet handling, you may shake it into the scurvy, the pox, or the consumption: nay, you may venture to tell what trade your patient is of, by his working-day's water, and, if you see his Sunday's water, what religion he is of. But, if you proceed by the scheme, there is nothing so probable as to say, he is bewitched under an ill tongue; that he has a take upon him, or is planet-struck, and the Lord of the Seventh shews you to be the only doctor in the world that can help him. Only here beware that you never pronounce a common-council-man with child, or a constable sick of the mother; and in other cases, if your judgment chance not to hit the nail on the head, it is but having recourse to necessary prudence, called by the su perstitious, the art of lying, as to tell them their stomach is fallen out of the place, but you doubt not but to fetch it up again. That they have straws in their lungs, as big as beams, and their livers are wasted with venery and drinking. Then as for therapeuticks, if your medicines be Galenical, though never so common, disguise them with strange names; call sena a specific, mithridate an elixir, extractum Rudii an Arcanum, and add a nostrum to Album Græcum. But if you would rather betake yourself to chymical devices, and want nonsense to cant their vertues; there are pamphlets enough abroad to furnish you. The Tincture of the Sun's Beard; the Powder of the Moon's Horns; or a Quintessence extracted from the Souls of the Heathen Gods: will go off rarely for an universal medicine; and bubble the simple out of their money first, and their lives afterwards.

But to deal ingenuously, I will teach you a far more ready and curious way, both of finding out and curing all diseases, than has yet been discovered; which is thus: take two large sheets of paper, on the one write down (or get the book-learned scribe that writes your bills to do it for you) the names of all ordinary distempers; on the other all celebrated medicines, whether catharticks, diureticks, diaphoreticks, or emeticks. Then when any patient comes or sends, and you have heard the story, retire a while, telling them a true physician must first study and then prescribe. In the mean time, by yourself, on the roll of Infirmities, fling a dye, and, as many as the chance is, so many diseases, you may assure them, the party has; but principally that where

on the dye falls; then the same on the paper of remedies, and prescribe or administer that which the dye lights on, to be taken so many times as there are spots on the chance. And, if the sick be pained in the head, you may easily discourse them into a persuasion that the disease, or at least the cause, is in their hand or toe; by which safe and ingenious course, you shall honestly refer it to fortune, to discover both the disease and medicine; whereas others through a conceited knowledge, or unhappy ignorance, render themselves more than accessary to the death of many.

There are several other directions fit to acquaint you with, which we shall reserve for the second part of this most useful directory. In the mean time (as your predecessors have done before you) practise these and give thanks

To your old friend,

Miso-Agyrtes.

THE PACQUET-BOAT ADVICE:

OR, A DISCOURSE

CONCERNING THE WAR WITH FRANCE,

Between some English Gentlemen and a Frenchman, betwixt Calais and Dover.

Omnis fabula fundatur in veritate.

London, Printed, MDCLXXVIII. Quarto, containing Twenty-one Pages.

HA

AVING received advice from some of my friends in England, that there was a little cloud of discontent arising, by reason of the jealousies of the growing greatness of the French, their many great and unexpected conquests, which they seemed not only obstinately resolved to keep themselves possessed of, but, by the progress of their arms, to enlarge and extend; and guessing, that, in all probability, these storms would not be allayed without some showers of blood, I began to unfix myself from my residence at Mompellier, whither my curiosity, and the course of my studies, had carried me; and my intentions were to have spent some time, and then to have passed over the Alps to see Italy, the garden of the world.

But receiving letters of fresh date, giving an account of his highness the Prince of Orange's marriage with the Lady Mary, and his majesty's calling of the parliament sooner than the general expectation :

I began then to think, that there was something at the bottom of the flying rumours. Being not willing to run the hazard of being ill treated in France, where I had not so perfectly made myself master of the lan. guage as to pass for a native, and considering, that I had no way to support myself, but by bills of exchange, or begging, if there should be a war between the two nations, I began to reflect how difficult it would be for me to secure myself of constant supplies, and that, if I had them, possibly, I might run the risque of being suspected and seized for an intelligencer; and not daring to trust to the charity of a people who are