his employment in the royal household.  George I. made him Anatomist to the Court, and, as a token of especial grace, on one occasion, went so far as to bestow upon the young Swiss his own sword.  His attainments in all the amusements of a gentleman probably had more to do with these advancements, however, than any professional skill.  He was a capital linguist; at fencing, leaping, running, and other manly exercises, he found few rivals; and his dabblings in architecture and botany were at least as notable as his mastership of chess and his skill as a musician.  But when it came to a scientific test of his surgical and anatomical pretensions, his failure was lamentable indeed.  The unquenchable thirst for notoriety—­which he may have mistaken for fame—­was perpetually leading him into questionable positions, and finally covered his name with ridicule and confusion.

An impudent woman, known as Mary Tofts, declared to the world, that, instead of a human child, she had given birth to a litter of rabbits.  How such a ridiculous tale ever found believers, it is impossible to conceive; but such was the case.  All England, with the very small exception of those who united the possession of learning with common sense, was imbued with the frenzy.  The price of warrens was abated to a mere song, and for a season a Londoner would as readily have eaten a baked child as a roasted rabbit.  The children of men were believed to populate the burrows, and authorities of the highest reputation lent an unhesitating support to the delusion.  The learned Whiston published in the circumstance a fulfilment of a prophecy of Esdras, and St. Andre loudly urged the authenticity of the entire fable and of the theories that were founded upon it.  But the satiric pen of Swift, the burin of Hogarth, and the graver investigations of Cheselden at last turned the popular tide, and covered St. Andre in particular with such a load of contemptuous obloquy as to drive him forever from the high circles he had moved in.  So great was his spleen, that, from that time forth, he would never suffer a dish upon his table or a syllable in his conversation that could in any way bring to mind the absurd occasion of his disgrace.

If all reports are to be believed, St. Andre’s career had led him into many singular adventures.  He had saved Voltaire’s life, by violently detaining Lord Peterborough, when the latter stood prepared to punish with peremptory death some peccadillo of the Frenchman’s.  Voltaire fled from the scene, while his adversary struggled to be released.  His services to Pope, when the poet was overturned in Lord Bolingbroke’s coach, did not protect him from a damaging allusion in the Epilogue to the Satires, where the source of the wealth that he got by his marriage with Lady Betty Molyneux is more plainly than politely pointed out.  Leaving forever, therefore, the sphere in which he had encountered so much favor and so much severity, he retired to Southampton to end his days in the society of his kindred; and it is more than probable that an indisposition to proclaim too loudly their identity of race with the unlucky surgeon was the cause of their modification of name by the immediate family from which John Andre sprung.