“They must be used like children; pleased with toys,
And anon whipt for their unruliness.”
Alternate cajolings and threats are the mildest form of treatment that we can hope to see in these places. The Elizabethan asylum keeper holds with Shakespeare that
“Diseases desperate grown
By desperate appliance are relieved
Or not at all.”
In the middle of this entertaining discussion we are interrupted. A prospective patient, it seems, is being announced, but the first words of the Master, who enters with him, suggest that we have been fortunate enough to meet with a case of false incarceration. A scholarly young man has been confined without cause and his friends in high quarters have come, armed with a “discharge from my lord cardinal,” to demand his release. “I am heartily sorry,” says the Master, “If ye allow him sound, pray take him with ye.” A gentleman protests that there is nothing in the Scholar
“light nor tainted,
No startings nor no rubs in all his answers;