Isaac Bickerstaff : physician and astrologer / [Richard Steele ; edited by Henry Morley].
- Richard Steele
- Date:
- 1887
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Isaac Bickerstaff : physician and astrologer / [Richard Steele ; edited by Henry Morley]. Source: Wellcome Collection.
16/200 (page 12)
![tiig’god in vain to ]mll a staff out of their Lauds. Tlic Falstaffs are strangely given to drinking: tliere are abundance of them in and alx)ut London. And one thing is very remarkable of this branch, and tliat is, there are just as many women as men in it. Tliere was a wicked stick of wowl of this name in Harry the Fourth’s time, one Sir John Falstaff. As for Tip.staff, the youngest son, he was an honest fellow ; but his sons, and his sons’ sons, have all of them been the veriest rogues living; it is this unlucky branch lias stocked the nation with that swarm of lawyers, attoi-neys, serjeants, and bailiffs, with which the nation is overrun. Tipstaff, being a seventh son, used to cure the king’s evil; but his rascally descendants are so far from having that healing quality that, by a touch upon the shoulder, they give a man such an ill habit of body that he can never come abroad after- wards. This is all I know of the line of Jacobstaff; his yonngcr brother, Isaacstaff, as I told you before, had five sons, and was married twice; his first wife was a Staff, for they did not stand upon false heraldry in those days, by whom he had one son, who, in process of time, being a schookuaster and well read in the Greek, called himself Distaff or Twicestaff. He was not very rich, so he put his children out to trades, and the Distaffs have ever since been employed in the woollen and linen manufactures, except myself, who am a genealogist. Pikestaff, the eldest son by the second](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b24871710_0016.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
