Volpone says:--'These turdy-facy, nasty-paty, lousy-fartical rogues,
with one poor groat's worth of unprepared antimony, finely wrapt up in
several scartoccios (covers), [33] are able, very well, to kill their
twenty a week, and play; yet these meagre, starved spirits, who have
stopt the organs of their minds with earthy oppilations, want not their
favourers among your shrivelled sallad-eating artizans, [34] who are
overjoyed that they may have their half-pe'rth of physic; though it
purge them into another world, it makes no matter.'
Jonson then continues his satire against 'Hamlet' by making Volpone,
disguised as a mountebank, sell medicine which is to render that 'purge'
('Hamlet') perfectly innocuous. He calls his medicine 'Oglio del Scoto:'
[35] good for strengthening the nerves; a sovereign remedy against all
kinds of illnesses; and, 'it stops a dysenteria, immediately.'
Nano praises its miraculous effects in a song:--
Had old Hippocrates, or Galen,
That to their books put med'cines all in,
But known this secret, they had never
(Of which they will be guilty ever)
Been murderers of so much paper,
Or wasted many a hurtless taper;
No Indian drug had e'er been famed,
Tobacco, sassafras not named;
Ne yet of guacum one small stick, sir,
Nor Raymund Lully's great elixir.
Ne had been known the _Danish Gonswart_,
Or Paracelsus, with his long sword.
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