on a cataract of Kronos-beard across his breast, and pulled forth three
white hairs, and presented them: 'And as honourably to the usurious Jews
as to the noble gentleman himself, that security was accepted!'

Emerging from hearty clamours, the illustrative orator fell upon the
question of political specifics:--Mr. Victor Radnor trusted to English
good sense too profoundly to be offering them positive cures, as they
would hear the enemy say he did. Yet a bit of a cure may be offered,
if we 're not for pushing it too far, in pursuit of the science of
specifics, in the style of the foreign physician, probably Spanish,
who had no practice, and wished for leisure to let him prosecute his
anatomical and other investigations to discover his grand medical
nostrum. So to get him fees meanwhile he advertised a cure for
dyspepsia--the resource of starving doctors. And sure enough his patient
came, showing the grand fat fellow we may be when we carry more of the
deciduously mortal than of the scraggy vital upon our persons. Any one
at a glance would have prescribed water-cresses to him: water-cresses
exclusively to eat for a fortnight. And that the good physician did.
Away went his patient, returning at the end of the fortnight, lean, and
with the appetite of a Toledo blade for succulent slices. He vowed he
was the man. Our estimable doctor eyed him, tapped at him, pinched his
tender parts; and making him swear he was really the man, and had eaten
nothing whatever but unadulterated water-cresses in the interval, seized
on him in an ecstasy by the collar of his coat, pushed him into the
surgery, knocked him over, killed him, cut him up, and enjoyed the
felicity of exposing to view the very healthiest patient ever seen under
dissecting hand, by favour of the fortunate discovery of the specific for
him. All to further science!--to which, in spite of the petitions of all
the scientific bodies of the civilized world, he fell a martyr on the
scaffold, poor gentleman! But we know politics to be no such empirical