“Plutus himself,
That knows the tinct and multiplying medicine,
Hath not in nature’s mystery more science,
Than I have in this ring.”
Chaucer, too, in his sarcastic excuse for the doctor’s avarice, refers to this old belief:
“And yet he was but esy of despence:
He kept that he wan in the pestilence.
For gold in physic is a cordial;
Therefore he loved it in special.”
Once more, in Sir Kenelm Digby’s “Receipts” (1674), we are told that the gold is to be calcined with three salts, ground with sulphur, burned in a reverberatory furnace with sulphur twelve times, then digested with spirit of wine “which will be tincted very yellow, of which, few drops for a dose in a fit vehicle hath wrought great effects.”
The term “grand liquor” is also used by Shakespeare for the aurum potabile of the alchemist, as in “Tempest” (v. 1):
“Where should they
Find this grand liquor that hath gilded them?”
Good Year. This is evidently a corruption of goujère, a disease derived from the French gouge, a common camp-follower, and probably alludes to the Morbus Gallicus. Thus, in “King Lear” (v. 3), we read:
“The good-years shall devour them, flesh and fell,
Ere they shall make us weep.”
With the corruption, however, of the spelling, the word lost in time its real meaning, and it is, consequently, found in passages where a sense opposite to the true one is intended.[607] It was often used in exclamations, as in “Merry Wives of Windsor” (i. 4): “We must give folks leave to prate: what, the good-jear!” In “Troilus and Cressida” (v. 1), Thersites, by the “rotten diseases of the south,” probably meant the Morbus Gallicus.
Handkerchief. It was formerly a common practice in England for those who were sick to wear a kerchief on their heads, and still continues at the present day among the common people in many places. Thus, in “Julius Cæsar” (ii. 1), we find the following allusion: