The Man Who Laughs | Page 3

white alder, the white bryony, the mealy-tree, the
traveller's joy, the buckthorn. He treated phthisis with the sundew; at
opportune moments he would use the leaves of the spurge, which
plucked at the bottom are a purgative and plucked at the top, an emetic.
He cured sore throat by means of the vegetable excrescence called
Jew's ear. He knew the rush which cures the ox and the mint which
cures the horse. He was well acquainted with the beauties and virtues of
the herb mandragora, which, as every one knows, is of both sexes. He
had many recipes. He cured burns with the salamander wool, of which,
according to Pliny, Nero had a napkin. Ursus possessed a retort and a
flask; he effected transmutations; he sold panaceas. It was said of him
that he had once been for a short time in Bedlam; they had done him
the honour to take him for a madman, but had set him free on
discovering that he was only a poet. This story was probably not true;
we have all to submit to some such legend about us.
The fact is, Ursus was a bit of a savant, a man of taste, and an old Latin
poet. He was learned in two forms; he Hippocratized and he Pindarized.
He could have vied in bombast with Rapin and Vida. He could have
composed Jesuit tragedies in a style not less triumphant than that of
Father Bouhours. It followed from his familiarity with the venerable
rhythms and metres of the ancients, that he had peculiar figures of
speech, and a whole family of classical metaphors. He would say of a
mother followed by her two daughters, There is a dactyl; of a father
preceded by his two sons, There is an anapæst; and of a little child
walking between its grandmother and grandfather, _There is an
amphimacer_. So much knowledge could only end in starvation. The
school of Salerno says, "Eat little and often." Ursus ate little and

seldom, thus obeying one half the precept and disobeying the other; but
this was the fault of the public, who did not always flock to him, and
who did not often buy.
Ursus was wont to say: "The expectoration of a sentence is a relief. The
wolf is comforted by its howl, the sheep by its wool, the forest by its
finch, woman by her love, and the philosopher by his epiphonema."
Ursus at a pinch composed comedies, which, in recital, he all but acted;
this helped to sell the drugs. Among other works, he had composed an
heroic pastoral in honour of Sir Hugh Middleton, who in 1608 brought
a river to London. The river was lying peacefully in Hertfordshire,
twenty miles from London: the knight came and took possession of it.
He brought a brigade of six hundred men, armed with shovels and
pickaxes; set to breaking up the ground, scooping it out in one place,
raising it in another--now thirty feet high, now twenty feet deep; made
wooden aqueducts high in air; and at different points constructed eight
hundred bridges of stone, bricks, and timber. One fine morning the
river entered London, which was short of water. Ursus transformed all
these vulgar details into a fine Eclogue between the Thames and the
New River, in which the former invited the latter to come to him, and
offered her his bed, saying, "I am too old to please women, but I am
rich enough to pay them"--an ingenious and gallant conceit to indicate
how Sir Hugh Middleton had completed the work at his own expense.
Ursus was great in soliloquy. Of a disposition at once unsociable and
talkative, desiring to see no one, yet wishing to converse with some one,
he got out of the difficulty by talking to himself. Any one who has
lived a solitary life knows how deeply seated monologue is in one's
nature. Speech imprisoned frets to find a vent. To harangue space is an
outlet. To speak out aloud when alone is as it were to have a dialogue
with the divinity which is within. It was, as is well known, a custom of
Socrates; he declaimed to himself. Luther did the same. Ursus took
after those great men. He had the hermaphrodite faculty of being his
own audience. He questioned himself, answered himself, praised
himself, blamed himself. You heard him in the street soliloquizing in
his van. The passers-by, who have their own way of appreciating clever
people, used to say: He is an idiot. As we have just observed, he abused

himself at times; but there were times also when he rendered himself
justice. One day, in one of these allocutions addressed to himself, he
was heard to cry out, "I have studied vegetation in all its mysteries--in
the stalk,