Page:Eight Friends of the Great - WP Courtney.djvu/57

Rh booksellers of his day and it was recognised by that body that the tasks assigned to him were discharged with labour and judgment. The value of his work is corroborated by the testimony of other writers of the present generation. The rev. J. H. Lupton in his edition of Sir Thomas More's Utopia (1895) states that the most noticeable of all the issues of bishop Burnet's translation of that work was the edition appended in 1758 to Warner's memoirs of More. The reprint had been suggested by the bishop's son, the judge of the court of common pleas. Warner was the "reputed author of the Letters of an Uncle to his nephew" a work which I have in vain endeavoured to find.

Ferdinando Warner had taken leave of the public as a writer, but with the desire of increasing "the happiness of a vast number of fellow sufferers" he signed at Barnes on 20 Oct. 1767, the preface to a treatise entitled "a full and plain account of the gout" (1768). His first touch of that disease was at the age of 17, and he had made observations on its ways for above 30 years. Many medical practitioners had been known to him. He was well acquainted with Mead, and he praised sir John Hill as "an ingenious man and an excellent botanist" who did himself honour in withdrawing his advertisement of the "Elixir of Bardana" as a specific. Sir Edward Hulse had described the gout as a disorder beyond his understanding; but Warner claimed that he could mitigate its attacks. Opium produced some relief. The Bath waters were very beneficial and Warner often wished that he lived near them. He recommended the practice of early rising and of riding on horseback, in the summer for two or three hours both morning and evening, and in winter in the middle of the day. About 1764 he began to drink whey at dinner and gradually reduced the period during which he was a martyr to the gout from 3 or 4 months to as many weeks. This was