CANTO III.]
HUDIBRAS.
223
Detect lost maidenheads by sneezing, 285
Or breaking wind of dames, or pissing;[1]
Cure warts and corns, with application
Of med'cines to th' imagination;[2]
Fright agues into dogs, and scare,
With rhymes, the tooth-ach and catarrh;[3] 290
Chase evil spirits away by dint
Of sickle, horseshoe, hollow flint;[4]
Spit fire out of a walnut-shell,[5]
Which made the Roman slaves rebel;
And fire a mine in China, here, 295
With sympathetic gunpowder.
- ↑ Democritus is said to have pronounced more nicely on the maid-servant of Hippocrates. Lilly professed this art, and said that no woman, whom he found a maid, ever twitted him with having been mistaken.
- ↑ Warts are still "charmed away;" and there are few persons who cannot recite numerous examples of the efficacy of "medicines applied to the imagination," for the removal of those unseemly excrescences.
- ↑ Butler seems to have raked together as many of the baits for human credulity as his reading could furnish, or he had ever heard mentioned. These charms for tooth-aches and coughs were well known to the common people a few years since. The word abracadabra, for fevers, is as old as Sammonicus. Haut haut hista pista vista, were recommended for a sprain by Cato, and Homer relates that the sons of Autolycus stopped the bleeding of Ulysses' wound by a charm. Soothing medicines are still called carminatives, from the Latin carmen, a magic formula. But the records of superstition in this respect are endless, and Grey quotes several which are very amusing. He says, "I have heard of a merry baronet. Sir B. B., who had great success in the cure of agues by charms. A gentleman of his acquaintance applying to him for the cure of a stubborn quartan, which had defied the doctors, he told him he had no faith, and would be prying into the secret, and then, notwithstanding the fit might be staved off awhile, it would certainly return. The gentleman promised him on his word of honour he would not look into it, but when he had escaped a second fit he could resist his curiosity no longer, and opened the paper, when he found in it no more than the words kiss — —." Another story of the kind is told by Selden in his Table-Talk. He cured a person of quality, who fancied he had two devils in his head, by wrapping a card in a piece of silk with strings, and hanging it round his neck. But those who delight in such stories will find an abundance of them in Brand's Popular Antiquities, 3 vols, post 8vo.
- ↑ There is scarcely a stable-door in the country (none certainly at Newmarket) without a horseshoe nailed on it, or on the threshold.
- ↑ This refers to the origin of the Servile war in Sicily, when Eunus, a Syrian, excited his companions in slavery to a revolt, by pretending a commission from the gods; and filling a nutshell with sulphur, breathed out fire and smoke in proof of his divine authority. See Livy, Florus, and other Roman historians.
