Volume 1

Portraits and lives of remarkable and eccentric characters.

Date:
[1819?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Portraits and lives of remarkable and eccentric characters. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    110/348 (page 58)
    times a-week,“~-wore a shirt of hair,—and, every night, hung his burial sheet at the foot of his bed. He wrote against such priests and monks as married, after the dissolution of the monasteries. But Bishop Poynet tells us, he kept three women, and thereby stained his pretensions to purity; but others assert, they were only patients labour¬ ing under a dangerous malady.—Be this as it may, he was acknowledged a learned man, a good poet, and an excellent physician; in corro¬ boration of which, he was principal physician to Henry VIII, and a member of the College of Physicians, London. The title-page of his Introduction to Know-r ledge, runs thus:—“ The first book of the Intro¬ duction of Knowledge, the which doth teach a man to speak part of all manner of languages, and is now the usage and fashion of all manner of countries ; and for to know the most part of all mknner of coins of money, the which is current in every region.” From this flaming title, it appears, that the art .of puffing is not peculiar to the present age, but was then practised both by authors and booksellers,