THE DOCTOR, &c.

VOL. IV.

PRELUDE OF MOTTOES.

The Muses forbid that I should restrain your meddling, whom I see already busy with the title, and tricking over the leaves: it is your own. I departed with my right, when I let it first abroad; and now so secure an interpreter I am of my chance, that neither praise nor dispraise from you can affect me.—The commendation of good things may fall within a many, the approbation but in a few; for the most commend out of affection, self-tickling, an easiness or imitation; but men judge only out of knowledge. That is the trying faculty; and to those works that will bear a judge, nothing is more dangerous than a foolish praise. You will say, I shall not have yours therefore; but rather the contrary, all vexation of censure. If I were not above such molestations now, I had great cause to think unworthily of my studies, or they had so of me. But I leave you to your exercise. Begin.

Je n'adresse point ce Livre à un Grand, sur une vaine opinion que j'aurois de le garantir ou de l'envie, ou de le faire vivre contre les rudes assauts du temps, d'autant que sa principale recommendation doit deriver de son propre fonds, et non de l'appuy de celuy à qui je le dedierois: car rien ne l'auctorisera, s'il n'est remply de belles conceptions, et tissu d'un langage bref, nerveux, et escrit d'une plume franche, resoluë et hardie. La rondeur d'escrire plaist; ces choses sont pour donner prix et pointe à nos escrits, et dépiter le temps et la mort. Je prie Dieu que ces Tomes ressemblent à la beauté d'un jardin, duquel l'un cueille une belle rose, l'autre une violette, ou une giroflée; ainsi souhaitay-je qu'en ceste diversité de sujects, dont elles sont plaines, chacun tire dequoy resveiller, resjouyr et contenter son esprit.

Take not too much at once, lest thy brain turn edge; Taste it first as a potion for physic, and by degrees thou shalt drink it as beer for thirst.

Qui l'a fait? Quiconque il soit, en ce a esté prudent, qu'il n'y a point mis son nom.

Most Prefaces are effectually apologies, and neither the Book nor the Author one jot the better for them. If the Book be good, it will not need an apology; if bad it will not bear one: for where a man thinks by calling himself noddy in the epistle, to atone for shewing himself to be one in the text, he does, with respect to the dignity of an author, but bind up two fools in one cover.

Si ne suis je toutesfois hors d'esperance, que si quelqu'un daigne lire, et bien gouster ces miens escrits, (encores que le langage n'en soit eslevé, ny enflé) il ne les trouvera du tout vuides de saveur; ny tant desgarniz d'utilité, qu'ils n'en puissent tirer plaisir et profit, pourveu que leurs esprits ne soyent auparavant saisiz de mal vueillance, ou imbuz de quelques autres mauvaises opinions. Je prie doncques tous Lecteurs entrer en la lecture des presents discours, delivres de toute passion et emulation. Car quand l'amertume d'envie ou mal vueillance, est detrempee en desir de contredire, elle ne laisse jamais le goust que depravé et mal jugeant.

Read, and fear not thine own understanding; this book will create a clear one in thee; and when thou hast considered thy purchase, thou wilt call the price of it a charity to thyself.

One caveat, good Reader, and then God speed thee!——Do not open it at adventures, and by reading the broken pieces of two or three lines, judge it; but read it through, and then I beg no pardon if thou dislikest it. Farewell.

CONTENTS.

THE AUTHOR APOSTROPHIZES SOME OF HIS FAIR READERS; LOOKS FARTHER THAN THEY ARE LIKELY TO DO, AND GIVES THEM A JUST THOUGH MELANCHOLY EXHORTATION TO BE CHEERFUL WHILE THEY MAY.

THE AUTHOR INTRODUCES HIS READERS TO A RETIRED DUCHESS, AND SUGGESTS A PARALLEL BETWEEN HER GRACE AND THE RETIRED TOBACCONIST.

If we present a mingle-mangle, our fault is to be excused, because the whole world is become a hodge-podge.

INCIDENTAL MENTION OF HAMMOND, SIR EDMUND KING, JOANNA BAILLIE, SIR WILLIAM TEMPLE, AND MR. THOMAS PEREGRINE COURTENAY. PETER COLLINSON AN ACQUAINTANCE OF MR. ALLISON'S. HOLIDAYS AT THAXTED GRANGE.

A TRANSITIONAL CHAPTER, WHEREIN THE AUTHOR COMPARES HIS BOOK TO AN OMNIBUS AND A SHIP, QUOTES SHAKESPEARE, MARCO ANTONIO DE CAMOS, QUARLES, SPENSER, AND SOMEBODY ELSE, AND INTRODUCES HIS READERS TO SOME OF THE HEATHEN GODS, WITH WHOM PERHAPS THEY WERE NOT ACQUAINTED BEFORE.

We are not to grudge such interstitial and transitional matter as may promote an easy connection of parts and an elastic separation of them, and keep the reader's mind upon springs as it were.

THOMAS GENT AND ALICE GUY, A TRUE TALE, SHOWING THAT A WOMAN'S CONSTANCY WILL NOT ALWAYS HOLD OUT LONGER THAN TROY TOWN, AND YET THE WOMAN MAY NOT BE THE PARTY WHO IS MOST IN FAULT.

THE AUTHOR HINTS AT CERTAIN CIRCUMSTANCES IN THE LIFE OF THOMAS GENT ON WHICH HE DOES NOT THINK IT NECESSARY TO DWELL.

THE READER IS REMINDED OF PRINCE ABINO JASSIMA AND THE FOX-LADY. GENT NOT LIKE JOB, NOR MRS. GENT LIKE JOB'S WIFE.

DR. SOUTHEY. JOHN BUNYAN. BARTHOLOMÆUS SCHERÆUS. TERTULLIAN. DOMENICO BERNINO. PETRARCH. JEREMY TAYLOR. HARTLEY COLERIDGE. DIEGO DE SAN PEDRO, AND ADAM LITTLETON.

This insertion is somewhat long, and utterly impertinent to the principal matter, and makes a great gap in the tale; nevertheless is no disgrace, but rather a beauty and to very good purpose.

THE AUTHOR RECOMMENDS A CERTAIN WELL-KNOWN CHARACTER AS A CANDIDATE FOR HONOURS, BOTH ON THE SCORE OF HIS FAMILY AND HIS DESERTS. HE NOTICES ALSO OTHER PERSONS WHO HAVE SIMILAR CLAIMS.

EFFECT OF MEDICAL STUDIES ON DIFFERENT DISPOSITIONS. JEW PHYSICIANS, ESTIMATION AND ODIUM IN WHICH THEY WERE HELD.

Confiesso la digression; mas es facil al que no quisiere leerla, passar al capitulo siguiente, y esta advertencia sirva de disculpa.

WHEREIN IT APPEARS THAT SANCHO'S PHYSICIAN AT BARATARIA ACTED ACCORDING TO PRECEDENTS AND PRESCRIBED LAWS.

A CHAPTER WHEREIN STUDENTS IN SURGERY MAY FIND SOME FACTS WHICH WERE NEW TO THEM IN THE HISTORY OF THEIR OWN PROFESSION.

J'ecrirai ici mes pensées sans ordre, et non pas peut-étre dans une confusion sans dessein; c'est le veritable ordre, et qui marquera toujours mon objet par le desordre même.

THE AUTHOR MORALIZES UPON THE VANITY OF FAME; AND WISHES THAT HE HAD BOSWELLIZED WHILE IT WAS IN HIS POWER TO HAVE DONE SO.

MR. BAXTER'S OFFICES. MILLER'S CHARACTER OF MASON; WITH A FEW REMARKS IN VINDICATION OF GRAY'S FRIEND AND THE DOCTOR'S ACQUAINTANCE.

WHEREIN THE AUTHOR SPEAKS OF A TRAGEDY FOR THE LADIES, AND INTRODUCES ONE OF WILLIAM DOVE'S STORIES FOR CHILDREN.

CHILDREN AND KITTENS. APHORISMS ASCRIBED TO THE LAUREATE, DR. SOUTHEY. MORE COLUMBIAN PHILOSOPHY.

This field is so spacious, that it were easy for a man to lose himself in it; and if I should spend all my pilgrimage in this walk, my time would sooner end than my way.

DR. CADOGAN. A REMARKABLE CASE OF HEREDITARY LONGEVITY. REMARKS ON THE ORDINARY TERM OF HUMAN LIFE.

THE AUTHOR RELATES SOME ANECDOTES, REFERS TO AN OPINION EXPRESSED BY A CRITIC ON THE PRESENT OPUS, AND DESCANTS THEREON.

Every man can say B to a battledore, and write in praise of virtue and the seven liberal sciences; thresh corn out of full sheaves, and fetch water out of the Thames. But out of dry stubble to make an after-harvest, and a plentiful crop without sowing, and wring juice out of a flint, that is Pierce a God's name, and the right trick of a workman.

CHAPTER CVI.

THE AUTHOR APOSTROPHIZES SOME OF HIS FAIR READERS; LOOKS FARTHER THAN THEY ARE LIKELY TO DO, AND GIVES THEM A JUST THOUGH MELANCHOLY EXHORTATION TO BE CHEERFUL WHILE THEY MAY.

Bertha, Arabella, Sarah, Mary, Caroline, Dorothea, Elizabeth, Kate, Susan,—how many answer to these names, each thinking that peradventure she may be the individual especially addressed—

you are looking with impatience for Deborah's wedding day, and are ready to inveigh against me for not immediately proceeding to that part of my story. Well has Sir William Davenant said,

but it is true in one sense as applied to you, and in another as applied to myself. To you my progress appears slow because you are eager to arrive at what, rightly considering it the most important point upon the whole journey of life, you may perhaps expect to prove the most interesting in this volume. Your thoughts have sped forward to that point and no farther. Mine travel beyond it, and this, were there no other motive, would retard me now. You are thinking of the bride and bridegroom, and the bridesmaid, and the breakfast at the vicarage, and the wedding dinner at the Grange, and the Doncaster bells which rung that day to the Doctor's ears the happiest peal that ever saluted them, from St. George's tower. My thoughts are of a different complexion; for where now are the joys and the sorrows of that day, and where are all those by whom they were partaken! The elder Allisons have long since been gathered to their fathers. Betsey and her husband (whom at that day she had never seen) are inhabitants of a distant church-yard. Mr. Bacon's mortal part has mouldered in the

same grave with Margaret's. The Doctor has been laid beside them; and thither his aged widow Deborah was long ago brought home, earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

1 PETRARCH.

“The deaths of some, and the marriages of others,” says Cowper, “make a new world of it every thirty years. Within that space of time the majority are displaced, and a new generation has succeeded. Here and there one is permitted to stay longer, that there may not be wanting a few grave Dons like myself to make the observation.”

Yet infinitely short as the term of human life is when compared with time to come, it is not so in relation to time past. An hundred and forty of our own generations carry us back to the Deluge, and nine more of ante-diluvian measure to the Creation,—which to us is the beginning of time; for “time itself is but a novelty, a late and upstart thing in respect of the Ancient of Days.”3 They who remember their grandfather and see their grandchildren, have seen persons belonging to five out of that number; and he who attains the age of threescore has seen two generations pass away. “The created world,” says Sir Thomas Browne, “is but a small parenthesis in eternity, and a short interposition for a time, between such a state of duration as was before it, and may be after it.” There is no time of life after we become capable of reflection, in which the world to come must not to any considerate mind appear of more importance to us than this;—no time in which we have not a greater stake there. When we reach the threshold of old age all objects of our early affections have gone

before us, and in the common course of mortality a great proportion of the later. Not without reason did the wise compilers of our admirable liturgy place next in order after the form of matrimony, the services for the visitation and communion of the sick, and for the burial of the dead.

2 YOUNG.

3 SAMUEL JOHNSON the elder.

I would not impress such considerations too deeply upon the young and happy. Far be it from me to infuse bitters into the cup of hope!

What the Spaniards call desengaño (which our dictionaries render “discovery of deceit, the act of undeceiving, or freeing from error,”—and for which if our language has an equivalent word, it is not in my vocabulary,)—that state of mind in which we understand feelingly the vanity of human wishes, and the instability of earthly joys,—that sad wisdom comes to all in time; but if it came too soon it would unfit us for this world's business and the common intercourse of life. When it comes in due season it fits us for a higher intercourse and for a happier state of existence.

4 SENECA.

CHAPTER CVII.

THE AUTHOR INTRODUCES HIS READERS TO A RETIRED DUCHESS, AND SUGGESTS A PARALLEL BETWEEN HER GRACE AND THE RETIRED TOBACCONIST.

There is a very pleasing passage in a letter of the Duchess of Somerset's, written in the unreserved intimacy of perfect friendship, without the slightest suspicion that it would ever find its way to the press. “'Tis true my dear Lady Luxborough,” she says, “times are changed with us, since no walk was long enough, or exercise painful enough to hurt us, as we childishly imagined; yet after a ball, or a masquerade, have we not come home very well contented to pull off our ornaments and fine clothes, in order to go to rest? Such methinks is the reception we naturally give to the warnings of our bodily decays; they seem to undress us by degrees, to prepare us for a rest that will refresh us far more powerfully than any night's sleep could do. We shall then find no weariness from the fatigues which either our bodies or our minds have undergone; but all tears shall be wiped from our eyes, and sorrow and crying and pain shall be no more: we shall then without weariness move in our new vehicles, and transport ourselves from one part of the skies to another, with much more ease and

velocity, than we could have done in the prime of our strength, upon the fleetest horses, the distance of a mile. This cheerful prospect enables us to see our strength fail, and await the tokens of our approaching dissolution with a kind of awful pleasure. I will ingenuously own to you, dear Madam, that I experience more true happiness in the retired manner of life that I have embraced, than I ever knew from all the splendour or flatteries of the world. There was always a void; they could not satisfy a rational mind: and at the most heedless time of my youth I well remember that I always looked forward with a kind of joy to a decent retreat when the evening of life should make it practicable.”

“If one only anticipates far enough, one is sure to find comfort,” said a young moralizer, who was then for the first time experiencing some of the real evils of life. A sense of its vanities taught the Duchess that wisdom, before she was visited with affliction. Frances, wife and widow of Algernon seventh Duke of Somerset, was a woman who might perhaps have been happier in a humbler station, but could not have been more uncorrupted by the world. Her husband inherited from his father the honours of the Seymour, from his mother those of the Percy family: but Lord Beauchamp,—

Lord Beauchamp I say, the son thus endowed, who should have succeeded to these accumulated honours, died on his travels at Bologna of the small-pox, in the flower of his youth. His afflicted mother in reply to a letter of consolation expressed herself thus: “The dear lamented son I have lost was the pride and joy of my heart: but I hope I may be the more easily excused for having looked on him in this light, since he was not so from the outward advantages he possessed, but from the virtues and rectitude of his mind. The prospects which flattered me in regard to him, were not drawn from his distinguished rank, or from the beauty of his person; but from the hopes that his example would have been serviceable to the cause of virtue, and would have shown the younger part of the world that it was possible to be cheerful without being foolish or vicious, and to be religious without severity or melancholy. His whole life was one uninterrupted course of duty and affection to his parents, and when he found the hand of death upon

him, his only regret was to think on the agonies which must rend their hearts: for he was perfectly contented to leave the world, as his conscience did not reproach him with any presumptuous sins, and he hoped his errors would be forgiven. Thus he resigned his innocent soul into the hands of his merciful Creator, on the evening of his birthday, which completed him nineteen.”

1 SHIRLEY.

In another letter she says, “when I lost my dear, and by me ever-lamented son, every faculty to please (if ever I were possessed of any such) died with him. I have no longer any cheerful thoughts to communicate to my friends; but as the joy and pride of my heart withers in his grave, my mind is continually haunting those mansions of the dead, and is but too inattentive to what passes in a world where I have still duties and attachments which I ought to be, and I hope I may truly say, I am, thankful for. But I enjoy all these blessings with trembling and anxiety, for after my dear Beauchamp, what human things can appear permanent? Youth, beauty, virtue, health, were not sufficient to save him from the hand of death, and who then can think themselves secure? These are the melancholy considerations which generally entertain my waking hours; though sometimes I am able to view the bright side of my fate, and ask myself for whom I grieve? only for myself? how narrow an affection does this imply! Could he have lived long as my fondest wish desired, what could I have asked at

the end of that term more than the assurance that he should be placed where I humbly hope, and confidently trust, he is, beyond the reach of sorrow, sin, or sickness?”

I have said that this Duchess, the Eusebia of Dr. Watts' Miscellanies, and once more known as the Cleora of her then famous friend Mrs. Rowe's Letters, might perhaps have been happier in a humbler station; but she could not have been more meek and more amiable, nor have possessed in a greater degree the christian virtue of humility. She was one of the daughters and coheiresses of the Honourable Henry Thynne, and was of the bed-chamber to the Princess of Wales, in which office she continued after that Princess became Queen Caroline. It was through her intercession that Savage's life was spared. When the Queen being prejudiced against that wretched man had refused to hear any application in his behalf, “she engaged in it,” says Johnson, “with all the tenderness that is excited by pity, and all the zeal that is kindled by generosity; an advocate,” he calls her, “of rank too great to be rejected unheard, and of virtue too eminent to be heard without being believed.” Her husband's father was commonly called the proud

Duke of Somerset,—an odious designation, which could not have been obtained unless it had been richly deserved: but there are some evil examples which incidentally produce a good effect, and Lord Beauchamp whose affability and amiable disposition endeared him to all by whom he was known, was perhaps more carefully instructed in the principles of Christian humility, and more sensible of their importance and their truth, because there was in his own family so glaring an instance of the folly and hatefulness of this preposterous and ridiculous sin. “It is a most terrible thing for his parents,” says Horace Walpole, “Lord Beauchamp's death; if they were out of the question, one could not be sorry for such a mortification to the pride of old Somerset. He has written the most shocking letter imaginable to poor Lord Hartford, telling him that it is a judgment upon him for all his undutifulness, and that he must always look upon himself as the cause of his son's death. Lord Hartford is as good a man as lives, and has always been

most unreasonably ill-treated by that old tyrant.” The Duke was brute enough to say that his mother had sent him abroad to kill him. It was not his mother's fault that he had not been secured, as far as human precautions avail against the formidable disease of which he died. Three years before that event she said in one of her letters, “Inoculation is at present more in fashion than ever; half my acquaintance are shut up to nurse their children, grandchildren, nephews or nieces. I could be content notwithstanding the fine weather to stay in town upon the same account, if I were happy enough to see my son desire it; but that is not the case, and at his age it must either be a voluntary act or left undone.”