Page:The Psychology of Shakespeare.pdf/52

Rh Mal.

'Tis call'd the evil :

A most miraculous work in this good king : Which often, since my here remain in England, I have seen him do.

How he solicits heaven

Himself best knows : but strangely-visited people, All swoln and ulcerous, pitiful to the eye,

The mere despair of surgery, he cures; Hanging a golden stamp about their necks, Put on with holy prayers: and 'tis spoken, To the succeeding royalty he leaves The healing benediction.” Old Fuller, in the plenitude of faith, gives a curious disqui sition of this same medical hocus pocus of royalty, the best part of which we subjoin : “And now the full time was come, wherein good King Edward exchanged this life for a better one. Who, as he was famous for many personal miracles, so he is reported to have entailed (by Heaven's consort,) an heréditary virtue in his successors, the kings of England, (only with this condition, that they continue constant in Christianity,) to cure the King's Evil. This disease, known to the Greeks by the name of Xopačec, termed by the Latines Struma, and scrophulae, hath its cause from phlegm, its chief and common outward residence in or near the neck or throat; where it expresseth

itself in knobs or kernells, pregnant oftentimes with corrupted bloud and other putrified matter, which, on the breaking forth of those bunches, floweth forth, equally offensive to sight, smell, and toutch. And yet this noisome disease is happily healed by the hands of the kings of England, stroaking the soar : and if any doubt of the truth thereof, they may be remitted to their own eyes for confirmation. But there is a sort of men who, to avoid the censure of over-easy credulity, and purchase the repute of prudent austerity, justly incurre the censure of affected frowardnesse. It being neither manners nor discretion in them, in matters notoriously known, to give daily exprience the lye, by the backwardnesse of their belief. “But whence this cure proceeds is much controverted by the learned.

Some recount it in the number of those avatróðakra

whose reason cannot be demonstrated.

For as in vicious

commonwealths bastards are frequent, who, being reputed Filii populi, have no particular father; so man's ignorance increaseth the number of occult qualities, (which I might call