"They say this town is full of cozenage,
As nimble jugglers that deceive the eye,
Disguised cheaters, prating mountebanks,
And many such like libertines of sin."
SHAKSPEARE.
+Caveat emptor+! This is the age of fraud, imposture, substitution,
transmutation, adulteration, abomination, contamination, and many others
of the same sinister ending, always excepting purification. Every thing
is debased and sophisticated, and "nothing is but what is not." All
things are mixed, lowered, debased, deteriorated, by our cozening
dealers and shopkeepers; and, bad as they are, there is every reason to
fear that they are "mox daturos progeniem vitiosiorem." We wonder at the
increase of bilious and dyspeptic patients, at the number of new books
upon stomach complaints, at the rapid fortunes made by practitioners who
undertake (the very word is ominous) to cure indigestion; but how can it
be otherwise, when Accum, before he took to quoting with his scissors,
assured us there was "poison in the pot;" when a recent writer has
shown that there are still more deleterious ingredients in the
wine-bottle; and when we ourselves have all had dismal intestine
evidence that our bread is partly made of ground bones, alum, plaster of
Paris; our tea, of aloe-leaves; our beer, of injurious drugs; our milk,
of snails and chalk; and that even the water supplied to us by our
companies is any thing rather than the real Simon Pure it professes to
be. Not less earnestly than benevolently do our quack doctors implore us
to beware of spurious articles; Day and Martin exhort us not to take our
polish from counterfeit blacking: every advertiser beseeches the
"pensive public" to be upon its guard against supposititious
articles--all, in short, is knavery, juggling, cheating, and
deception.--_Ibid._
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