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HISTORY OF ENGLAND.

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from tlie sixteenth chapter of the Gospel of Saint Mark wasread. When the words, “They shall lay their hands on thesick, and they shall recover,” had been pronounced, therewas a pause, and one of the sick was brought up to the King.His Majesty stroked the ulcers and swellings, and hung roundthe patient’s neck a white riband to which was fastened a goldcoin. The other sufferers were then led up in succession; and,as each was touched, the chaplain repeated the incantation,“They shall lay then- hands on the sick, and they shall re-cover.” Then came the epistle, prayers, antiphonies and abenediction. The service may still be found in the prayerbooks of the reign of Anne. Indeed it was not till some timeafter the accession of George the First that the University ofOxford ceased to reprint the Office of Healing together withthe Liturgy. Theologians of eminent learning, ability, andvirtue gave the sanction of their authority to this mummery ;*and, what is stranger still, medical men of high note believed,or affected to believe, in the balsamic virtues of the royal hand.We must suppose that every surgeon who attended Charles theSecond was a man of high repute for skill; and more than oneof the surgeons who attended Charles the Second has left us asolemn profession of faith in the King’s miraculous power.One of them is not ashamed to tell us that the gift was com-municated by the unction administered at the coronation; thatthe cures were so numerous and sometimes so rapid that theycould not be attributed to any natural cause; that the failureswere to be ascribed to want of faith'on the part of the patients;

* See Collier's Desertion discussed, 1G89. Thomas Carte, who was adisciple, and, at one time, an assistant of Collier, inserted, so lute as theyear 1747, in a bulky History of England, an exquisitely absurd note, inwhich he assured the world that, to his certain knowledge, the Pretenderhad cured the scrofula, and very gravely inferred that the healing virtuewas transmitted by inheritance, and was quite independent of any undtion.See Carte’s History of England, vol. i. page 291. »