Part 36 (1/2)

O blessed health! cried my father, making an exclamation, as he turned over the leaves to the next chapter, thou art before all gold and treasure; 'tis thou who enlargest the soul,-and openest all its powers to receive instruction and to relish virtue.-He that has thee, has little more to wish for;-and he that is so wretched as to want thee,-wants every thing with thee.

I have concentrated all that can be said upon this important head, said my father, into a very little room, therefore we'll read the chapter quite through.

My father read as follows:

'The whole secret of health depending upon the due contention for mastery betwixt the radical heat and the radical moisture'-You have proved that matter of fact, I suppose, above, said Yorick. Sufficiently, replied my father.

In saying this, my father shut the book,-not as if he resolved to read no more of it, for he kept his fore-finger in the chapter:-nor pettishly,-for he shut the book slowly; his thumb resting, when he had done it, upon the upper-side of the cover, as his three fingers supported the lower side of it, without the least compressive violence.-

I have demonstrated the truth of that point, quoth my father, nodding to Yorick, most sufficiently in the preceding chapter.

Now could the man in the moon be told, that a man in the earth had wrote a chapter, sufficiently demonstrating, That the secret of all health depended upon the due contention for mastery betwixt the radical heat and the radical moisture,-and that he had managed the point so well, that there was not one single word wet or dry upon radical heat or radical moisture, throughout the whole chapter,-or a single syllable in it, pro or con, directly or indirectly, upon the contention betwixt these two powers in any part of the animal oeconomy-

'O thou eternal Maker of all beings!'-he would cry, striking his breast with his right hand (in case he had one)-'Thou whose power and goodness can enlarge the faculties of thy creatures to this infinite degree of excellence and perfection,-What have we Moonites done?'

Chapter 3.x.x.xIV.

With two strokes, the one at Hippocrates, the other at Lord Verulam, did my father achieve it.

The stroke at the prince of physicians, with which he began, was no more than a short insult upon his sorrowful complaint of the Ars longa,-and Vita brevis.-Life short, cried my father,-and the art of healing tedious! And who are we to thank for both the one and the other, but the ignorance of quacks themselves,-and the stage-loads of chymical nostrums, and peripatetic lumber, with which, in all ages, they have first flatter'd the world, and at last deceived it?

-O my lord Verulam! cried my father, turning from Hippocrates, and making his second stroke at him, as the princ.i.p.al of nostrum-mongers, and the fittest to be made an example of to the rest,-What shall I say to thee, my great lord Verulam? What shall I say to thy internal spirit,-thy opium, thy salt-petre,-thy greasy unctions,-thy daily purges,-thy nightly clysters, and succedaneums?

-My father was never at a loss what to say to any man, upon any subject; and had the least occasion for the exordium of any man breathing: how he dealt with his lords.h.i.+p's opinion,-you shall see;-but when-I know not:-we must first see what his lords.h.i.+p's opinion was.

Chapter 3.x.x.xV.

'The two great causes, which conspire with each other to shorten life, says lord Verulam, are first-

'The internal spirit, which like a gentle flame wastes the body down to death:-And secondly, the external air, that parches the body up to ashes:-which two enemies attacking us on both sides of our bodies together, at length destroy our organs, and render them unfit to carry on the functions of life.'

This being the state of the case, the road to longevity was plain; nothing more being required, says his lords.h.i.+p, but to repair the waste committed by the internal spirit, by making the substance of it more thick and dense, by a regular course of opiates on one side, and by refrigerating the heat of it on the other, by three grains and a half of salt-petre every morning before you got up.-

Still this frame of ours was left exposed to the inimical a.s.saults of the air without;-but this was fenced off again by a course of greasy unctions, which so fully saturated the pores of the skin, that no spicula could enter;-nor could any one get out.-This put a stop to all perspiration, sensible and insensible, which being the cause of so many scurvy distempers-a course of clysters was requisite to carry off redundant humours,-and render the system complete.

What my father had to say to my lord of Verulam's opiates, his salt-petre, and greasy unctions and clysters, you shall read,-but not to-day-or to-morrow: time presses upon me,-my reader is impatient-I must get forwards-You shall read the chapter at your leisure (if you chuse it), as soon as ever the Tristra-paedia is published.-

Sufficeth it, at present to say, my father levelled the hypothesis with the ground, and in doing that, the learned know, he built up and established his own.-