Mrs. Bull did? Better and better, said they; the parts heal, and her
constitution mends: if she submits to our government she will be abroad
in a little time. Nay, it is reported that they wrote to her friends
in the country that she should dance a jig next October in Westminster
Hall, and that her illness had been chiefly owing to bad physicians. At
last, one of them was sent for in great haste, his patient grew worse
and worse: when he came, he affirmed that it was a gross mistake, and
that she was never in a fairer way. Bring hither the salve, says he,
and give her a plentiful draught of my cordial. As he was applying his
ointments, and administering the cordial, the patient gave up the ghost,
to the great confusion of the quack, and the great joy of Bull and his
friends. The quack flung away out of the house in great disorder,
and swore there was foul play, for he was sure his medicines were
infallible. Mrs. Bull having died without any signs of repentance or
devotion, the clergy would hardly allow her a Christian burial. The
relations had once resolved to sue John for the murder, but considering
better of it, and that such a trial would rip up old sores, and discover
things not so much to the reputation of the deceased, they dropped their
design. She left no will, only there was found in her strong box the
following words written on a scrip of paper--"My curse on John Bull,
and all my posterity, if ever they come to any composition with the Lord
Strutt."

She left him three daughters, whose names were Polemia, Discordia, and
Usuria.**

* Endeavours and hopes of some people to hinder the
dissolution of that Parliament.

** War, faction, and usury.

CHAPTER X. Of John Bull's second Wife, and the good Advice that she gave
him.*

John quickly got the better of his grief, and, seeing that neither his
constitution nor the affairs of his family, could permit him to live in
an unmarried state, he resolved to get him another wife; a cousin of his
last wife's was proposed, but John would have no more of the breed. In
short, he wedded a sober country gentlewoman, of a good family and a
plentiful fortune, the reverse of the other in her temper; not but that
she loved money, for she was saving, and applied her fortune to pay
John's clamorous debts, that the unfrugal method of his last wife, and
this ruinous lawsuit, had brought him into. One day, as she had got
her husband in a good humour, she talked t