Punch. Oh, dear! Oh, lord! Help! help! I am murdered! I'm a dead man! Will nobody save my life? Doctor! Doctor! Come, and bring me to life again. I'm a dead man. Doctor! Doctor! Doctor!
Enter Doctor.
Doctor. Who calls so loud?[1]
Punch. Oh, dear! Oh, lord! murder!
Doctor. What is the matter? Bless me, who is this? My good friend, Mr. Punch? Have you had an accident, or are you only taking a nap on the grass after dinner?
Punch. Oh, Doctor! Doctor! I have been thrown: I have been killed.
Doctor. No, no, Mr. Punch; not so bad as that, sir: you are not killed.
Punch. Not killed, but speechless.[2] Oh, Doctor! Doctor!
- ↑ So the Apothecary, in "Romeo and Juliet," of whom we say, as Dante does of the she-wolf—
"Che di tutte brame
Sembiava carca nella sua magrezza."enters at the exclamation of the hero, with "Who calls so loud?" Punch's Doctor is quite "another guess sort of a gentleman," to use a phrase of Farquhar's, "fat with full fees and no physic."
- ↑ A good deal has been written on the etymology and meaning of what is called an Irish bull, of which we have here a specimen; some have supposed it to be derived from a ridicule of the Pope's bulls, &c., &c.; but its origin is very simple: a bull is a blunder; and only let the reader pronounce the two first letters of the word blunder, and he immediately has the true etymology—blunder, or per ellipsin bl. Milton correctly defines a bull, when he says it "takes away the essence of that which it calls itself." (Smectymn. Apology.) but rather before the time when he flourished it seems to have been almost synonymous, with a jest. Thus in Shirley's "Gamester," 1637 Act 3, Hazard says to Wilding,
"He will talk desperately
And swear he is the father of all the bulls
Since Adam: if all fail, he has a project
To print his jests.
