“As a ready test of black tea being manufactured from old tea-leaves, dyed with logwood, &c. moisten some of the tea, and rub it on white paper, which it will blacken when not genuine. If you wish to be more particular, infuse a quantity of the sample in half a pint of cold soft water for three or four hours. If the water is then of an amber colour, and does not become red when you drop some oil of vitriol or sulphuric acid into it, you may presume the tea to be good. Adulterated black tea, when infused in cold water, gives a bluish black tinge, and it becomes instantly red with a few drops of oil of vitriol.
Note to [page 154].
I observe that I have forgotten to give “a local habitation and a name” among the morning water and Sir Reverence doctors, to his Doctorship Doctor Laing, of Newman Street, Oxford Street. And I have to beg pardon, most humbly and reverently, for passing over the quondam Greenwich Crumples, alias Doctor Cameron, alias Mister Coley, in Berners Street, Oxford Street;—the Doctor to a new patient with his morning water and “shiners” in hand, but Mister, when the said “humbugged” patient, having discovered the fraud practised upon him, returns to “blow up” the Doctor for his tricks and ignorance.
Note to [page 166].
After all the vapouring and drivelling nonsense that has been said, sung and trumpeted forth by a certain portion of the Periodical Press respecting the “Simplicity of Health,” it is really consoling to find at last a man of sense and critical acumen having spirit and honesty enough to relieve the public from the delusions under which it is suffering from the book in question.
“An immense quantity of drivel,” says the spirited Editor of The Edinburgh Literary Journal, 1829, “has found its way into books professing to give an account of the best mode of preserving health; but of all the drivel it has ever been our lot to peruse, that contained in the work entitled the “Simplicity of Health,” is the most pre-eminent.” The ingenious and honest reviewer, after having pointed out several of the fooleries and extravagancies of the book, adds, “We have no patience with a piece of humbug like this; we shall not insult the good sense of our readers with more of this doting nonsense.” It must be admitted that this sentence is dictated in the strictest and the justest sense of criticism, and that had all those who have ventured to laud and recommend that dangerous little book adopted somewhat of its spirit, much bodily and mental suffering might have been saved to many people who will become the victims of its misjudged and culpable directions.
The burst of indignation and ridicule expressed by the Critic respecting Hortator’s foolish directions for “Squirting water briskly into the eyes by a syringe,” is too fraught with truth and utility to be omitted: “Is it not plain from this, that the poor squirting wretch must have bleared and blood-shot eyes? Imagine a beautiful girl at her morning toilette, presenting one of this dirty old booby’s squirts at her clear blue laughing eyes! But the fact is, this impudent old wife must be descended from a long line of tailors, who have bred in and in, till the imbecile race has ended in the scarecrow who has spawned the “Simplicity of Health.”
It is with much satisfaction that I am able to support the opinion which I have expressed at page 166, by so just and judicious a criticism as the above; had I stood alone in opinion, that opinion would have been assigned to any other than its true cause—a sense of public duty, which ought with every true patriot to be paramount to every other consideration.
I shall now close my well meant, and I hope I may say, useful and patriotic little volume, with a few words respecting those pests and scourges of society, the sharking and extortionate part of the pawnbroking trade, and those banes of human comfort and existence the madhouses.