CHAPTER TEN.
WHICH SHOWETH THAT HE WHO PLAYS AT BOWLS, WILL SOMETIMES MEET WITH RUBBERS.
Sir Launcelot, boiling with indignation at the venality and faction of the electors, whom he had harangued to so little purpose, retired with the most deliberate disdain towards one of the gates of the town, on the outside of which his curiosity was attracted by a concourse of people, in the midst of whom stood Mr.Ferret, mounted upon a stool, with a kind of satchel hanging round his neck, and a phial displayed in his right hand, while he held forth to the audience in a very vehement strain of elocution.
Crabshaw thought himself happily delivered when he reached the suburbs, and proceeded without halting; but his master mingled with the crowd, and heard the orator express himself to this effect:-- "Very likely you may undervalue me and my medicine, because I don't appear upon a stage of rotten boards, in a shabby velvet coat, and tie-periwig, with a foolish fellow in a motley coat, to make you laugh, by making wry faces; but I scorn to use these dirty arts for engaging your attention.

These paltry tricks, ad captandum vulgus, can have no effect but on idiots; and if you are idiots, I don't desire you should be my customers.

Take notice, I don't address you in the style of a mountebank, or a High German doctor; and yet the kingdom is full of mountebanks, empirics, and quacks.

We have quacks in religion, quacks in physic, quacks in law, quacks in politics, quacks in patriotism, quacks in government--High German quacks, that have blistered, sweated, bled, and purged the nation into an atrophy.

But this is not all; they have not only evacuated her into a consumption, but they have intoxicated her brain, until she is become delirious; she can no longer pursue her own interest, or, indeed, rightly distinguish it.