Page:Chronicles of pharmacy (Volume 2).djvu/85

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mentioned in "All's Well that Ends Well" (Act II., Sc. 3). In "Coriolanus" (Act II., Sc. 1) Menenius says of a letter from Coriolanus that it gives him an estate of seven years' health, adding "the most sovereign prescription in Galen is but empiricutick, and," compared with this letter, "of no better report than a horse-drench."

Apothecaries are mentioned in "Henry VI" (Part II., Act III., Sc. 3), when Cardinal Beaufort, delirious on his death-bed, cries, "Bid the apothecary bring the strong poison that I bought of him." Also in "Pericles" (Act III., Sc. 2), the amateur physician Cerimon, a Lord of Ephesus, who had studied medicine, and "by turning o'er authorities" had made himself familiar with "the blest infusions that dwell in vegetives, in metals, stones," gives a prescription to his servant, saying, "Give this to the 'pothecary, and tell me how it works." Apothecaries' weights are used as metaphors in "All's Well that Ends Well" (Act II., Sc 3) when Lafeu, who has given Parolles "most egregious indignity," which the latter says he has not deserved, replies "Yes, good faith, every dram of it; and I will not bate thee a scruple," and by Falstaff, who, in his interview with the Chief Justice, refers rather enigmatically to drams and scruples. Falstaff again, in "Merry Wives of Windsor," is responsible for the simile of those who "smell like Bucklersbury in simple time." The Dr. Caius in the same play, with his "by gar" and comical English, is assumed by some interpreters to have been a burlesque on Sir Theodore Mayerne, but except that Mayerne was French and certainly spoke English with a foreign accent, there is no reason for associating him with the character. Mayerne never acquired English. In one of his later letters he writes of Lady Cherosbury, for Shrewsbury. There was a very famous Dr. Caius, who had been