alth," p.
153: "The leaves [of coleworts] laid to by themselves, or bruised with
barley meale, are good for the inflammations, and soft swellings,
burnings, impostumes, and cholerick sores or quats," etc.

_Plague._ "Tokens," or "God's tokens," were the terms for those spots on
the body which denoted the infection of the plague. In "Love's Labour's
Lost" (v. 2), Biron says:

"For the Lord's tokens on you do I see;"

and in "Antony and Cleopatra" (iii. 10) there is another allusion:

"_Enobarbus._ How appears the fight?

_Scarus._ On our side like the token'd pestilence,
Where death is sure."

In "Troilus and Cressida" (ii. 3), Ulysses says of Achilles:

"He is so plaguy proud that the death tokens of it
Cry--'No recovery.'"

King Lear, too, it would seem, compares Goneril (ii. 4) to these fatal
signs, when he calls her "a plague sore." When the _tokens_ had appeared
on any of the inhabitants, the house was shut up, and "Lord have mercy
upon us" written or printed upon the door. Hence Biron, in "Love's
Labour's Lost" (v. 2), says:

"Write, 'Lord have mercy on us,' on those three;
They are infected, in their hearts it lies;
They have the plague, and caught it of your eyes."

The "red pestilence," referred to by Volumnia in "Coriolanus" (iv. 1),
probably alludes to the cutaneous eruptions common in the plague:

"Now the red pestilence strike all trades in Rome,
And occupations perish!"

In "The Tempest" (i. 2), Caliban says to Prospero, "The red plague rid
you."

_Poison._ According to a vulgar error prevalent in days gone by, poison
was supposed to swell the body, an allusion to which occurs in "Julius
Caesar" (iv. 3), where, in the quarrel between Brutus and Cassius, the
former declares:

"You shall digest the venom of your spleen,
Though it do split you."

We may also compare the following passage in "2 Henry IV." (iv. 4),
where the king says:

"Learn this, Thomas,
And thou shalt prove a shelter to thy friends;
A hoop of gold to bind thy brothers in,
That the united vessel of their blood,
Mingled with venom of suggestion--
As, force perforce, the age will pour it in--
Shall never leak, though it do work as strong
As aconitum, or rash gunpowder."

In "King John," Hubert, when describing the effect of the poison upon
the monk (v. 6), narrates how his "bowels suddenly burst ou