for good and all, premising that the knowledge of what I am about to
set down did not come upon me at this period of my History, but was
gathered up, in Odds and Ends in subsequent epochs of my career:--some
of it, indeed, many years afterwards. Parson Hodge had managed--all
losses allowed for--to feather his nest pretty well out of his
attendance on Squire Bartholomew Pinchin, and the ten or twelve pound he
doled out to me (whether the story about the draft on the Goldsmith was
a Cock and Bull one or not) must have been but a mere fleabite to him. I
heard that he went down to the Bath, and dropping his Clerical Dignity
for awhile, set up for a fashionable Physician of High Dutch extraction
that was to cure all ailments. Doctor Von Hoogius I think he called
himself; and his travelling about with my little Master had given him
just such a smattering of Tongues as to enable him to speak Broken
English with just so much of a foreign accent as to make it unlike a
Brogue or a Burr. The guineas came in pretty quickly, and I believe that
he cured several people of the Quinsy with pills made of dough,
hogslard, cinnamon, and turmeric, and that he was highly successful in
ridding ladies of fashion of the vapours by means of his Royal Arabian
Electuary, which was nothing more than white Jamaica Rum coloured pink
and with a flavouring of Almonds. The regular Practitioners, however,
grew jealous of him, and beginning to ask him impertinent questions
about his Diploma, he was fain to give up Legitimate practice, and to
pick up a dirty Living as a mere Quack, and Vendor of Pills, Potions,
Salves, Balsams, and Elixirs of Life. Then he came down in the world,
owing to a Waiting Gentlewoman whose fortune he must needs tell, and
whom, 'tis said, he cozened out of three quarters' wages; so, for fear
of being committed by the justices as a Rogue and Vagabond, he then kept
a Herb Shop for some time, with great success, until he got into trouble
about a Horse, and being clearly Tart of that crime, very wisely shifted
his quarters to the Kingdom of Ireland. I have heard that by turns he
was, in his New Sphere, a Player at the Dublin Theatre, a Drawer at a
Usquebaugh Shop in Cork, a hedge-schoolmaster among the Bogtrotters--a
wild, savage kind of People, that infest the Southern parts of that
fertile but distracted kingdom--a teacher of the Mathematics in Belfast,
and a fiddler going about to wakes and weddings in the county of Galway.
'Twas wh