uated her into a consumption, but they have
intoxicated her brain, until she is become delirious; she can no longer
pursue her own interest, or, indeed, rightly distinguish it. Like the
people of Nineveh, she can hardly tell her right hand from her left;
but, as a changeling, is dazzled and delighted by an ignis fatuus, a
Will-o'-the-wisp, an exhalation from the vilest materials in nature, that
leads her astray through Westphalian bogs and deserts, and will one day
break her neck over some barren rocks, or leave her sticking in some
H----n pit, or quagmire.

"For my part, if you have a mind to betray your country, I have no
objection. In selling yourselves and your fellow-citizens, you only
dispose of a pack of rascals who deserve to be sold. If you sell one
another, why should not I sell this here Elixir of Long Life, which, if
properly used, will protract your days till you shall have seen your
country ruined. I shall not pretend to disturb your understandings,
which are none of the strongest, with a hotchpotch of unintelligible
terms, such as Aristotle's four principles of generation, unformed
matter, privation, efficient, and final causes. Aristotle was a pedantic
blockhead, and still more knave than fool. The same censure we may
safely put on that wiseacre, Dioscorides, with his faculties of simples--
his seminal, specific, and principal virtues; and that crazy commentator,
Galen, with his four elements, elementary qualities, his eight
complexions, his harmonies and discords. Nor shall I expatiate on the
alkahest of that mad scoundrel, Paracelsus, with which he pretended to
reduce flints into salt; nor archaeus or spiritus rector of that
visionary Van Helmont, his simple, elementary water, his gas, ferments,
and transmutations; nor shall I enlarge upon the salt, sulphur, and oil,
the acidum vagum, the mercury of metals, and the volatilised vitriol of
other modern chemists, a pack of ignorant, conceited, knavish rascals,
that puzzle your weak heads with such jargon, just as a Germanised
m----r throws dust in your eyes, by lugging in and ringing the changes on
the balance of power, the Protestant religion, and your allies on the
continent; acting like the juggler, who picks your pockets while he
dazzles your eyes and amuses your fancy with twirling his fingers and
reciting the gibberish of hocus pocus; for, in fact, the balance of power
is a mere chimera. As for the Protestant religion, nobody gives himself
a