A MOUNTEBANK
Is an epidemic physician, a doctor-errant, that keeps himself up by being, like a top, in motion, for if he should settle he would fall to nothing immediately. He is a pedlar of medicines, a petty chapman of cures, and tinker empirical to the body of man. He strolls about to markets and fairs, where he mounts on the top of his shop, that is his bank, and publishes his medicines as universal as himself; for everything is for all diseases, as himself is of all places--that is to say, of none. His business is to show tricks and impudence. As for the cure of diseases, it concerns those that have them, not him, further than to get their money. His pudding is his setter that lodges the rabble for him, and then slips him, who opens with a deep mouth, and has an ill day if he does not run down some. He baits his patient's body with his medicines, as a rat-catcher does a room, and either poisons the disease or him. As soon as he has got all the money and spent all the credit the rabble could spare him, he then removes to fresh quarters where he is less known and better trusted. If but one in twenty of his medicines hit by chance, when nature works the cure, it saves the credit of all the rest, that either do no good or hurt; for whosoever recovers in his hands, he does the work under God; but if he die, God does it under him: his time was come, and there's an end. A velvet jerkin is his prime qualification, by which he is distinguished from his pudding, as he is with his cap from him. This is the usher of his school, that draws the rabble together, and then he draws their teeth. He administers physic with a farce, and gives his patients a preparative of dancing on the rope, to stir the humours and prepare them for evacuation. His fool serves for his foil, and sets him off as well as his bragging and lying. The first thing he vents is his own praise, and then his medicines wrapped up in several papers and lies. He mounts his bank as a vaulter does his wooden horse, and then shows tricks for his patients, as apes do for the King of Spain. He casts the nativity of urinals, and tries diseases, like a witch, by water. He bails the place with a jig, draws the rabble together, and then throws his hook among them. He pretends to universal medicines; that is, such as, when all men are sick together, will cure them all, but till then no one in particular.