THE OLD ENGLISH WAY OF PROCURING A LOAN.
LONDON QUACKS.
These ancient robbers did not add grandiloquent lying to theft. It was with them a simple taking of what they wanted without circumlocution. It was highway robbery to picking pockets, and was certainly the preferable of the two.
Were I an Emperor, with absolute power, I should immediately discharge the honest soldier, who would work for a living were he out of the service, and draft in the army all these fellows. And the regiments composed of them should lead every forlorn hope, charge every battery, and do all the dangerous and fatiguing work that soldiers have to do. A country could afford to lose a great many battles to rid itself of these worse than thieves.
Do you remember Dickens’ Montagu Tigg in Martin Chuzzlewit? I used to think it an overdrawn picture, but it is not. It is as correct a portrait as was ever limned.
America has been deemed the paradise of the quack, but before England she must pale her ineffectual fires. Next to beer, patent medicines stare you in the face everywhere. The walls fairly shine with the advertisements of remedies for every disease known to the faculty, and when that supply runs out the ingenious proprietor invents a stock of new ailments that never did exist, and inasmuch as the least of them are six syllabled ones, it is to be hoped never will.