The Poor may have Advice (that is, Nothing) for Nothing.
“Nothing for nothing” is a rate of exchange which is current even to this day, and was very likely known long before the time of this physician, whose effort could hardly have been expected to prove disastrous to the empirics, as he, among other peculiarities, regards what should have been his strong point of dissimilarity from them as “nothing.” Another bill of the same period is noticeable for the explicitness of the address given in it:—
When you are in Baldwin’s Gardens, that you may not mistake, ask for Leopard’s Court, and there at the Sign of the Moon and Stars, you will find the Louvain Doctor from 8 in the Morning till 7 at Night. As you pass by the end of Leopard’s Court you may see the Sign of the Moon and Stars, which, pray, observe, least you mistake: for there are several Pretenders, therefore keep this bill. Baldwin’s Gardens are near Holborn.
Baldwin’s Gardens would hardly be a good address in these times for even the veriest quack. It is now about the foulest specimen extant of that kind of backslum or alley where, a generation back, according to Hood, pigs and Irish were wont to rally. The pigs, except in the form of hocks, “Jerry Lynch” heads, and other portions of bacon, have been removed by Act of Parliament since the poet sang his simple lay of “The Lost Child,” but the Irish have increased and multiplied with an activity unknown to them in other pursuits. The powers of the finest peasantry in the world are undoubted in one particular of philoprogenitiveness under any circumstances, and they seem to exert them to the utmost when least required and most inconvenient—when they are “pigged up” in small rooms and festering courts, and when every fresh birth is an outrage upon the sanatory laws supposed to govern us, and upon their own sense of decency. We are in the habit of hearing most of our domestic and civic misfortunes ascribed to the higher wages and increased leisure of the labouring classes of the present, as compared with