Note 108 — CANTO IV. GRAND ATTACK!
Reading edition
Prepare the batteries of thy journal.
Here I can, with certainty, calculate on the most powerful co-operation. This——, what shall I call it? This official Gazette of the profession—this Medico-Chymico-Comico-Repository, for the effusions of self-puffers, prescribing rules and recipes,
“How best to fill his purse, and thin the town;”
this powerful instrument of offensive and defensive warfare, has ever, with becoming vigilance, guarded its post against Perkinean invaders, and suffered no occasion to pass without a squirt of the Gallic acid of satire, when there was deemed a possibility of blackening the common enemy.
I can never sufficiently express my approbation of the Carthagenian cunning with which this journal has been conducted. Dr B. professing great impartiality, in an early number, (see vol. ii. p. 85) invited communications on the subject of the tractors. Subsequent management evidently showed a slight omission in the doctor’s notice, and that he meant communications on one side only; for he has omitted no pains to procure and publish whatsoever could be suggested against the tractors; but though reports of cases in their favor, and all the publications of the patentee have been before him, not a syllable of these was ever noticed by that gentleman; neither has it ever appeared by his journal that such facts ever existed.