honoured, caressed, or cheerfully
exercising his learning and his skill in poverty
and obscurity, but sowing no less than his
titled, initialled brother, good seed, surely
afterwards to grow up into a rich harvest of
glory in the broad lands of reward.

Much do we desire cognisance of all these
things; likewise when the first fee was taken,
and the first consultation held; who invented
the charming system of more than cuneiform
hieroglyphics employed by the Faculty to
express scruples, drachms, and grains; what
scholiast upon Priscian settled the declensions
and conjugations of doctors' Latin, and
when prescriptions first came into use; when
doctors began to disagree, and when first
"physicians was in vain." I should like the
historian, too, to clear up the story of Dr.
Faustus; whom I consider myself to have
been a highly ingenious practitioner, considerably
in advance of his age, but with a fancy
for cabalistics, table-turning and spirit-rapping
which eventually brought him into bad odour.
I want further information about Macbeth's
medical attendant:—why he wore trunk hose
and roses in his shoes, while the rest of the
court wore kilts and bonnets; and whether
he married the gentlewoman after the
discomfiture of his iniquitous master and the
coronation of Malcolm at Scone. I am
particularly anxious to know more of Dr.
Butts, that wise physician attached to the
person of Henry the Eighth, and whose
duties appear to have been confined to looking
out of window in the company of his
royal patron. And I confess that I have an
ardent longing to know all about the famous
Dr. Fell, whether he was a doctor of
physic, law, divinity, letters, or music; why
the great lexicographer didn't like him, and
whv the reason thereof he could not tell.
Who is to be our Doctor Dubitantium on the
doctorial question ? When may we expect
the History of the Faculty in a cheap form
for Railway Reading ?

If you expect such a work from me,
you are grievously mistaken. I don't know
much about anything: I want other people
to tell me; I am as ignorant about the
doctors of by-gone ages as a Zulu Kaffir;
though, of the Faculty of the present
day (and I acknowledge it with a sort of
groan) I do know something. Yes, the doctor
and I are old friends. We know a good deal
about one another.

The Faculty was aware of me, of course,
prior to my appearance upon the stage of
men. The Faculty was down upon me
immediately afterwards. The Faculty put fetters
on my legs, and fullers' earth poultices upon
my eyes, blisters on my chest, worsted behind
my ears. The Faculty put glass cups between
my shoulders, scarified my flesh with infernal
machines full of sharp steel teeth, and
sucked up my young blood. The Faculty
introduced to my notice sundry monsters
of a slimy nature, originally from Asia
Minor, I believe, which arrived in pill-boxes,
and drank of me till they fell
drunk into plates of salt, to dream, no doubt,
about their father of the horse connection,
and their three sisters who cried
continually, " Give! Give! " The Faculty " put
rat's-bane in my porridge and halters in my
pew," in the shape of draughts and powders.
The Faculty have endowed me to this
day with a loathing for orange-marmalade
as recalling horrible traditions of ipecacuanha.
It has made black currant jelly
abhorrent to me in connection with powdered
aloes; and it has implanted a deadly and
inextinguishable dread of roasted apple, lest it
should be calomel in disguise, and a
shuddering suspicion of flower of brimstone,
when I see treacle. I have been rubbed
by the Faculty, scraped, lanced, probed,
plastered and pickled by the Faculty.
The faculty sat by my side at dinner, far
more awfully present than Sancho Panza's
physician. The Faculty denied me pudding
twice after meat; sent me to bed when
I was broad awake; kept me indoors when
my limbs yearned for exercise; forbade me
to read the books I loved; tabooed open
windows; banned green meats and fruits;
swathed me in hot stifling clothing; kept me
from church pleading the danger of being
over-heated, and from the play—the dear,
delightful play, with its wax lights, gay
dresses, and miraculous transformations—
through unfounded apprehensions of catching
cold. Oh, you little children! if you could
only find some juvenile Fox to write your
martyrology. Saint Catherine and her wheel,
Saint Lawrence and his gridiron, Saint
Denis and his sore throat, Saint Stephen
and his stones; what would their tortures
be in comparison with your sufferings at the
instigation of the merciless Faculty?

Yet I bear the Faculty no ill-will for all
the experiments they made upon me,
and I dare say that in my case they
did it for the best. By all accounts I must
have suffered under dreadful ailments during
my nonage. I know that there was always
something the matter with my eyes, or my
limbs, or my head. I can remember eyes
that looked at me with a kind, sad
pitying wonder, as I played about, an ailing
child, marvelling doubtless how any of the
cheerfulness and sprightliness of infancy
could abide in that afflicted and feeble
frame. I can dimly recall words of sorrow
and commiseration that I hoarded with the
child's words—avarice, when I was very young
—words from those who must have seen me
swathed and bandaged up among vigorous
playmates, or watched me sitting apart
in weird and unnatural confabulation with
my elders, when I should have been
gambolling among my peers. I can
remember that I was taken to a great many
new doctors to make me " quite well," and to
a great many new spots to make me " quite