Page:Devonshire Characters and Strange Events.djvu/852



EELE, a poet and dramatist, was a Devonshire man by birth, but of no family of consequence in the county, as the name does not once occur in the Heralds' Visitations, either as a family entitled to bear arms or in the alliances of such. He became a student of Christ Church, Oxford, about the year 1573, where he studied to good effect and took his Master's degree in 1579. Although he unquestionably studied, yet he also spent his spare time in revelry. He was always hard up for money, and was quite unscrupulous how he procured it. On one occasion, but later, when in middle life, he was riding to Oxford on a borrowed horse, and stayed the night at Wycombe, where the landlady of the inn was a great woman for herbs and nostrums of all sorts for the cure of every kind of disease. George Peele fell in with her humour, admired her prescriptions, and said: "I am a doctor and surgeon myself, and am on my way to visit a gentleman of large estate in Warwickshire, who is fallen into a consumption." "Why—bless my heart," exclaimed the hostess, "our squire here is very bad, and supposed to be in a consumption. The surgeons have given him up."

Next morning at daybreak away runs the good-natured woman to the Hall, rouses the squire's wife, and tells her that a notable London doctor is staying at 726