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be used to corroborate the brain. I hope you have upon no account promoted sternutation by hellebore.

GENT. Sir, no such matter: you utterly mistake. DR. Mistake! am I not a physician? and shall an apothecary dispute my nostrums?-You may perhaps have filled up a prescription or two of Ratcliff's, which chanced to succeed, and with that very prescription, injudiciously prescribed to different constitutions, have destroyed a multitude. Pharmacopola componat, medicus solus præscribat, says Celsus. Fumigate him, I say, this very evening, while he is relieved by an interval.

DENN. 'Sdeath, sir, my friend an apothecary! a base mechanick! He who, like myself, professes the noblest sciences in the universe, criticism and poetry! Can you think I would submit my writings to the judgment of an apothecary? By the immortals, he himself inserted three whole paragraphs in my Remarks, had a hand in my Publick Spirit, nay, assisted me in my description of the furies and infernal regions, in my Appius.

Mr. LINTOT. He is an author; you mistake the gentleman, doctor; he has been an author these twenty years, to his bookseller's knowledge, and no man's else.

DENN. Is all the town in a combination? Shall poetry fall to the ground? Must our reputation be lost to all foreign countries? O destruction! perdition! Opera! Opera*! As poetry once raised cities, so, when poetry fails, cities are overturned, and the world is no more.

DR. He raves, he raves; Mr. Lintot, I pray

*He wrote a treatise proving the decay of publick spirit to proceed from Italian operas.

you

you pinion down his arms, that he may do no mischief.

DENN. O I am sick, sick to death!

DR. That is a good symptom, a very good symptom. To be sick to death (say the modern physicians) is an excellent symptom. When a patient is sensible of his pain, 'tis half a cure. Pray, sir, of what are you sick?

DENN. Of every thing, of every thing; I am sick of the sentiments, of the diction, of the protasis, of the epitasis, and the catastrophe.-Alas, what is become of the drama, the drama?

Mr. Lintot drank fetch more pre

OLD WOм. The dram, sir? up all the gin just now; but I'll go sently.

DENN. O shameful want! scandalous omission! By all the immortals, here is no peripatia, no change of fortune in the tragedy! Z- no change at all!

OLD WOм. Pray, good sir, be not angry; I'l fetch change.

DR. Hold your peace, woman; his fit increases; good Mr. Lintot, hold him.

Mr. LINTOT. Plague on't! I am damnably afraid they are in the right of it, and he is mad in earnest. If he should be really mad, who the devil will buy the Remarks?

[Here Mr. Lintot scratched his head.

DR. Sir, I shall order you the cold bath tomorrow.- Mr. Lintot, you are a sensible man; pray send for Mr. Verdier's servant, and, as you are a friend to the patient, be so kind as to stay this evening, while he is cupped on the head. The symptoms of his madness seem to be desperate; for Avicen

says

says, that if learning be mixed with the brain, that is not of a contexture fit to receive it, the brain ferments, till it be totally exhausted. We must eradicate these undigested ideas out of the pericranium, and reduce the patient to a competent knowledge of

himself.

DENN. Caitiffs, stand off! unhand me, miscreants! Is the man, whose whole endeavours are to bring the town to reason, mad? Is the man who settles poetry on the basis of antiquity, mad? Dares any one assert, there is a peripatia in that vile piece, that's foisted upon the town for a dramatick poem? That man is mad, the town is mad, the world is mad. See Longinus in my right hand, and Aristotle in my left; I am the only man among the moderns, that support them. Am I to be assassinated; and shall a bookseller, who has lived upon my labours, take away that life to which he owes his support?

GENT. By your leave, gentlemen, I apprehend you not. I must not see my friend ill treated; he is no more affected with lunacy than myself: I am also of the same opinion, as to the peripatia.--Sir, by the gravity of your countenance and habit, I should conceive you to be a graduate physician; but, by your indecent and boisterous treatment of this man of learning, I perceive you are a violent sort of person, I am loth to say quack, who, rather than his drugs should lie upon his own hands, would get rid of them by cramming them into the mouths of others: the gentleman is of good condition, sound intellectuals, and unerring judgment: I beg you will not oblige me to resent these proceedings.

THESE

THESE were all the words that passed among us at this time; nor was there need for more; it being necessary we should make use of force in the cure of my patient.

I privately whispered the old woman to go to Mr. Verdier's in Long-Acre, with orders to come immediately with cupping glasses: in the mean time, by the assistance of Mr. Lintot, we locked his friend into a closet, who, it is plain from his last speech, was likewise touched in his intellects; after which we bound our lunatick hand and foot down to the bedstead, where he continued in violent ravings, notwithstanding the most tender expressions we could use to persuade him to submit to the operation, till the servant of Verdier arrived. He had no sooner clapped half a dozen cupping-glasses on his head, and behind his ears, but the gentleman abovementioned bursting open the clo et, ran furiously upon us, cut Mr. Dennis's bandages, and let drive at us with a vast folio, which sorely bruised the shin of Mr. Lintot; Mr. John Dennis also, starting up with the cupping-glasses on his head, seized another folio, and with the same dangerously wounded me in the scull, just above my right temple. The truth of this fact Mr. Verdier's servant is ready to attest upon oath, who, taking an exact survey of the volumes, found that, which wounded my head, to be Gruterus's Lampas Critica: and that, which broke Mr. Lintot's shin, was Scaliger's Poetices. After this, Mr. John Dennis, strengthened at once by rage and madness, snatched up a peruke-block that stood by the bedside, and wielded it round in so furious a manner, that he broke three of the cupping-glasses from the crown of his head, so

that

He

that much blood trickled down his visage. looked so ghastly, and his passion was grown to such a prodigious height, that myself, Mr. Lintot, and Verdier's servant, were obliged to leave the room in all the expedition imaginable.

I took Mr. Lintot home with me, in order to have our wounds dressed, and laid hold of that opportunity of entering into discourse with him about the madness of this person, of whom he gave me the following remarkable relation:

That on the 17th of May, 1712, between the hours of ten and eleven in the morning, Mr. John Dennis entered into his shop, and, opening one of the volumes of the Spectator, in the large paper, did suddenly, without the least provocation, tear out that of No.- where the author treats of poetical justice, and cast it into the street. That the said Mr. John Dennis, on the 27th of March, 1712, finding on the said Mr. Lintot's counter a book called An Essay on Criticism, just then published, he read a page or two with much frowning, till, coming to these two lines,

Some have at first for wits, then poets past,

Turn'd criticks next, and prov'd plain fools at last—

he flung down the book in a terrible fury, and cried out, "By G-d he means me."

That, being in his company on a certain time, when Shakspeare was mentioned as of a contrary opinion to Mr. Dennis, he swore the said Shakspeare a rascal, with other defamatory expressions, which gave Mr. Lintot a very ill opinion of the said Shakspeare.

was

That,

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