Ursus was sagacious, contradictory, odd, and inclined to the singular expositions which we term fables.  He had the appearance of believing in them, and this impudence was a part of his humour.  He read people’s hands, opened books at random and drew conclusions, told fortunes, taught that it is perilous to meet a black mare, still more perilous, as you start for a journey, to hear yourself accosted by one who knows not whither you are going; and he called himself a dealer in superstitions.  He used to say:  “There is one difference between me and the Archbishop of Canterbury:  I avow what I am.”  Hence it was that the archbishop, justly indignant, had him one day before him; but Ursus cleverly disarmed his grace by reciting a sermon he had composed upon Christmas Day, which the delighted archbishop learnt by heart, and delivered from the pulpit as his own.  In consideration thereof the archbishop pardoned Ursus.

As a doctor, Ursus wrought cures by some means or other.  He made use of aromatics; he was versed in simples; he made the most of the immense power which lies in a heap of neglected plants, such as the hazel, the catkin, the white alder, the white bryony, the mealy-tree, the traveller’s joy, the buckthorn.  He treated phthisis with the sundew; at opportune moments he would use the leaves of the spurge, which plucked at the bottom are a purgative and plucked at the top, an emetic.  He cured sore throat by means of the vegetable excrescence called Jew’s ear.  He knew the rush which cures the ox and the mint which cures the horse.  He was well acquainted with the beauties and virtues of the herb mandragora, which, as every one knows, is of both sexes.  He had many recipes.  He cured burns with the salamander wool, of which, according to Pliny, Nero had a napkin.  Ursus possessed a retort and a flask; he effected transmutations; he sold panaceas.  It was said of him that he had once been for a short time in Bedlam; they had done him the honour to take him for a madman, but had set him free on discovering that he was only a poet.  This story was probably not true; we have all to submit to some such legend about us.

The fact is, Ursus was a bit of a savant, a man of taste, and an old Latin poet.  He was learned in two forms; he Hippocratized and he Pindarized.  He could have vied in bombast with Rapin and Vida.  He could have composed Jesuit tragedies in a style not less triumphant than that of Father Bouhours.  It followed from his familiarity with the venerable rhythms and metres of the ancients, that he had peculiar figures of speech, and a whole family of classical metaphors.  He would say of a mother followed by her two daughters, There is a dactyl; of a father preceded by his two sons, There is an anapaest; and of a little child walking between its grandmother and grandfather, There is an amphimacer.  So much knowledge could only end in starvation.  The school of Salerno says, “Eat little and often.”  Ursus ate little and seldom, thus obeying one half the precept and disobeying the other; but this was the fault of the public, who did not always flock to him, and who did not often buy.