Page:Poor Robin's True Character of a Schold - 1678.djvu/10

6 to render the operation more verbal. After which, she distilled it again through a speaking-trumpet, and closed up the remaining spirits in the mouth of a cannon. Then she opened the graves of all new-deceased pettifoggers, mountebanks, barbers, coffee-newsmongers, and fish-wives: and with the skin of their tongues, made a bladder covered o'er with drum-heads, and filled with storms, tempests, whirlwinds, thunders, lightnings, &c. These for better incorporation, she set seven years in a rough sea to ferment, and then mixing them with the rest, rectified the whole three times a day for a twelve-month in a balneum of quicksilver. Lastly, to irrabiate the whole elixir, and make it more churlish, she cut a vein under the tongue of the dog-star, drawing thence a pound of the most choleric blood; from which sublimating the spirits, she mixed them with the foam of a mad dog: and then putting altogether in the forementioned bladder, stitched it up with the nerves of Socrates's wife.

Out of this noble preparation, and a crooked rib (emblem of future crossness) Dame Nature first composed a SHREW, whose posterity (as is frequent with noxious animals) has since so overspread the world, that scarce an alley or village is free from some of her lineage.