en towards the
south, whilst it is guarded from the north wind by a ridge of hills, and
from the smells and smoke of London by its distance; which last is not
the fate of Kensington, when the wind blows from any corner of the east.

Obligations to Mr. Ward I shall always confess; for I am convinced that
he omitted no care in endeavoring to serve me, without any expectation
or desire of fee or reward.

The powers of Mr. Ward's remedies want indeed no unfair puffs of mine
to give them credit; and though this distemper of the dropsy stands, I
believe, first in the list of those over which he is always certain of
triumphing, yet, possibly, there might be something particular in my
case capable of eluding that radical force which had healed so many
thousands. The same distemper, in different constitutions, may possibly
be attended with such different symptoms, that to find an infallible
nostrum for the curing any one distemper in every patient may be almost
as difficult as to find a panacea for the cure of all.

But even such a panacea one of the greatest scholars and best of men
did lately apprehend he had discovered. It is true, indeed, he was no
physician; that is, he had not by the forms of his education acquired
a right of applying his skill in the art of physic to his own private
advantage; and yet, perhaps, it may be truly asserted that no other
modern hath contributed so much to make his physical skill useful to the
public; at least, that none hath undergone the pains of communicating
this discovery in writing to the world. The reader, I think, will scarce
need to be informed that the writer I mean is the late bishop of Cloyne,
in Ireland, and the discovery that of the virtues of tar-water.

I then happened to recollect, upon a hint given me by the inimitable
and shamefully-distressed author of the Female Quixote, that I had
many years before, from curiosity only, taken a cursory view of bishop
Berkeley's treatise on the virtues of tar-water, which I had formerly
observed he strongly contends to be that real panacea which Sydenham
supposes to have an existence in nature, though it yet remains
undiscovered, and perhaps will always remain so.

Upon the reperusal of this book I found the bishop only asserting his
opinion that tar-water might be useful in the dropsy, since he had known
it to have a surprising success in the cure of a most stubborn anasarca,
which is indeed no other than, as the word implies, the drop