poor Tom? One pound
of your sheep's-feathers to make poor Tom a blanket? or one cutting of
your sow's side, no bigger than my arm; or one piece of your salt meat
to make poor Tom a sharing-horn; or one cross of your small silver,
towards a pair of shoes; well and wisely, give poor Tom an old sheet to
keep him from the cold; or an old doublet and jerkin of my master's;
well and wisely, God save the king and his council." Such is a history
drawn from the very archives of mendicity and imposture; and written
perhaps as far back as the reign of James the First: but which prevailed
in that of Elizabeth, as Shakspeare has so finely shown in his Edgar.
This _Maund_, and these assumed manners and _costume_, I should not have
preserved from their utter penury, but such was the rude material which
Shakspeare has worked up into that most fanciful and richest vein of
native poetry, which pervades the character of the wandering Edgar,
tormented by "the foul fiend" when he

---- bethought
To take the basest and most poorest shape
That ever penury, in contempt of man,
Brought near to beast.

And the poet proceeds with a minute picture of "Bedlam beggars." See
_Lear_, Act ii. Sc. 3.]

[Footnote 179: Aubrey's information is perfectly correct; for those
impostors who assumed the character of Tom o' Bedlams for their own
nefarious purposes used to have a mark burnt in their arms, which they
showed as the mark of Bedlam. "The English Villanies" of Decker, c 17.
1648.]

[Footnote 180: I discovered the present in a very scarce collection,
entitled "Wit and Drollery," 1661; an edition, however, which is not the
earliest of this once fashionable miscellany.]

[Footnote 181: Harman, in his curious "Caveat, a warning for Common
Cursitors, vulgarly called Vagabones," 1566, describes the "Abraham Man"
as a pretended lunatic, who wandered the country over, soliciting food
or charity at farm-houses, or frightening and bullying the peasantry for
the same. They described themselves as cruelly treated in Bedlam, and
nearly in the words of Shakspeare's Edgar.]

[Footnote 182: Dr. James, the translator of "Pauli's Treatise on Tea,"
1746, says: "According to the Chinese, tea produces an appetite after
hunger and thirst are satisfied; therefore, the drinking of it is to be
abstained from." He concludes his treatise by saying: "As Hippocrates
spared no pains to remove and root out the Athenian plague, so have I
used the