"Plutus himself, That knows the tinct and multiplying medicine, Hath not in nature's mystery more science, Than I have in this ring."
Chaucer, too, in his sarcastic excuse for the doctor's avarice, refers to this old belief:
"And yet he was but esy of despence: He kept that he wan in the pestilence. For gold in physic is a cordial; Therefore he loved it in special."
Once more, in Sir Kenelm Digby's "Receipts" (1674), we are told that the gold is to be calcined with three salts, ground with sulphur, burned in a reverberatory furnace with sulphur twelve times, then digested with spirit of wine "which will be tincted very yellow, of which, few drops for a dose in a fit vehicle hath wrought great effects."
The term "grand liquor" is also used by Shakespeare for the _aurum potabile_ of the alchemist, as in "Tempest" (v. 1):
"Where should they Find this grand liquor that hath gilded them?"
_Good Year._ This is evidently a corruption of _goujère_, a disease derived from the French _gouge_, a common camp-follower, and probably alludes to the _Morbus Gallicus_. Thus, in "King Lear" (v. 3), we read:
"The good-years shall devour them, flesh and fell, Ere they shall make us weep."
With the corruption, however, of the spelling, the word lost in time its real meaning, and it is, consequently, found in passages where a sense opposite to the true one is intended.[607] It was often used in exclamations, as in "Merry Wives of Windsor" (i. 4): "We must give folks leave to prate: what, the good-jear!" In "Troilus and Cressida" (v. 1), Thersites, by the "rotten diseases of the south," probably meant the _Morbus Gallicus_.
[607] Wright's "Notes to King Lear" (1877), p. 196.
_Handkerchief._ It was formerly a common practice in England for those who were sick to wear a kerchief on their heads, and still continues at the present day among the common people in many places. Thus, in "Julius Cæsar" (ii. 1), we find the following allusion:
"O, what a time have you chose out, brave Caius, To wear a kerchief! Would you were not sick!"
"If," says Fuller, "this county [Cheshire] hath bred no writers in that faculty [physic], the wonder is the less, if it be true what I read, that if any here be sick, they make him a posset and tye a kerchief on his head, and if that will not mend him, then God be merciful to him."[608]