IN the same village where my father and my mother dwelt, dwelt also a
thin, upright, motherly, notable, good old body of a midwife, who with
the help of a little plain good sense, and some years full employment
in her business, in which she had all along trusted little to her own
efforts, and a great deal to those of dame Nature,—had acquired, in her
way, no small degree of reputation in the world:—by which word _world_,
need I in this place inform your worship, that I would be understood to
mean no more of it, than a small circle described upon the circle of
the great world, of four _English_ miles diameter, or thereabouts, of
which the cottage where the good old woman lived is supposed to be the
centre?—She had been left it seems a widow in great distress, with
three or four small children, in her forty-seventh year; and as she was
at that time a person of decent carriage,—grave deportment,—a woman
moreover of few words and withal an object of compassion, whose
distress, and silence under it, called out the louder for a friendly
lift: the wife of the parson of the parish was touched with pity; and
having often lamented an inconvenience to which her husband’s flock had
for many years been exposed, inasmuch as there was no such thing as a
midwife, of any kind or degree, to be got at, let the case have been
never so urgent, within less than six or seven long miles riding; which
said seven long miles in dark nights and dismal roads, the country
thereabouts being nothing but a deep clay, was almost equal to
fourteen; and that in effect was sometimes next to having no midwife at
all; it came into her head, that it would be doing as seasonable a
kindness to the whole parish, as to the poor creature herself, to get
her a little instructed in some of the plain principles of the
business, in order to set her up in it. As no woman thereabouts was
better qualified to execute the plan she had formed than herself, the
gentlewoman very charitably undertook it; and having great influence
over the female part of the parish, she found no difficulty in
effecting it to the utmost of her wishes. In truth, the parson join’d
his interest with his wife’s in the whole affair, and in order to do
things as they should be, and give the poor soul as good a title by law
to practise, as his wife had given by institution,—he cheerfully paid
the fees for the ordinary’s licence himself, amounting in the whole, to
the sum of eighteen shillings and four pence; so that betwixt them
both, the good woman was fully invested in the real and corporal
possession of her office, together with all its _rights, members, and
appurtenances whatsoever._
These last words, you must know, were not according to the old form in
which such licences, faculties, and powers usually ran, which in like
cases had heretofore been granted to the sisterhood. But it was
according to a neat _Formula_ of _Didius_ his own devising, who having
a particular turn for taking to pieces, and new framing over again all
kind of instruments in that way, not only hit upon this dainty
amendment, but coaxed many of the old licensed matrons in the
neighbourhood, to open their faculties afresh, in order to have this
wham-wham of his inserted.
I own I never could envy _Didius_ in these kinds of fancies of his:—But
every man to his own taste.—Did not Dr. _Kunastrokius_, that great man,
at his leisure hours, take the greatest delight imaginable in combing
of asses tails, and plucking the dead hairs out with his teeth, though
he had tweezers always in his pocket? Nay, if you come to that, Sir,
have not the wisest of men in all ages, not excepting _Solomon_
himself,—have they not had their HOBBY-HORSES;—their running
horses,—their coins and their cockle-shells, their drums and their
trumpets, their fiddles, their pallets,—their maggots and their
butterflies?—and so long as a man rides his HOBBY-HORSE peaceably and
quietly along the King’s highway, and neither compels you or me to get
up behind him,—pray, Sir, what have either you or I to do with it?