The king observes:
“Thou be’st a noble doctor if that’s all true thou be’st talking about.”
And the doctor, taking to prose, replies:
“I’m not like those little mountebank doctors that go about the streets, and say this, that, and the other, and tell you as many lies in one half-hour as you would find in seven years; but what I does, I does clean before your eyes, and ladies and gentlemen, if you won’t believe your own eyes, ’tis a very hard case.”
The king agreeing that it is, the doctor goes to the patient, saying:
“I have a little bottle that I call golden foster drops. One drop on the root of this man’s tongue and another on his crown, will strike the heat through his body, and raise him off the ground.”
Accordingly the Turkish knight slowly rises and decamps, St. George exclaiming:
“Arise, arise, thou cowardly dog, and see how uprightly thou can’st stand. Go home into your own country and tell them what old England has done for you, and how they’ll fight a thousand better men than you.”
This last speech may have been added after the Crimean War, as the drama was copied out in 1857; but the staple of it was known long before, though with variations, in different villages, and it always concludes with little Johnny Jack, the smallest of the troup, with a bundle of dolls on his back, going round with a jingling money-box, saying:
Here comes I, little Johnny Jack,
Wife and family at my back,
My family’s large though I am small,
And so a little helps us all.
Roast beef, plum pudding, strong beer and mince-pies,
Who loves that better than Father Christmas or I?
One mug of Christmas ale soon will make us merry and sing;
Some money in our pockets will be a very fine thing.
So, ladies and gentlemen, all at your ease,
Give the Christmas boys just what you please.