costume-mingled with standard roses-stickup collared gents-vases, and urns, and plaster notabilities.

Here, too, Vulgarity presides, and scares away the lingering vestige of Gentility. Here-in pompous state the consequential Cit walks forth in all the pride and circumstance of wealth, and frowns on all who come "betwixt the wind and his nobility."

Here over-dressed Humanity monopolises every path, and rudely elbows modest Worth away. Here congregate the world's deceptions, marshalled on by Fashion's magic wand. The aspiring tailor the retiring merchant-the briefless barrister -the crafty lawyer-the pompous city clerk

mingled with rich and rare vulgarities of every nation and of every clime-all ambitious to perform the favourite rôle of country squire.

What a jumbling of races and of tribes-of trades, vocations, pretensions, and professionsall in pursuit of fancied greatness! yet how few could represent, with any credit to themselves, even the simplest of the world's distinctions, if attained! Here dwell the mixed and discordant elements which patronise the village doctor, and profess to judge of scientific men, much as they would the texture of a shawl

or fashion of a coat. Here, too, brass plates by dozens glitter in the sun, setting forth, in every variety of type, the titles of the healing craft:"Doctor" and "Mister," "Surgeon" and et cætera; and of all the incomprehensible et cæteras of life, the et cætera on a doctor's plate is most incomprehensible. It smacks of hidden things—of secret qualities of strange diplomas-and leads the public to believe that the doctor with et cætera on his sign is something more important than the rest. With all the display of doctors' plates, we rarely find that more than two men flourishthe rest exist in name; and it is to this glaring and universal injustice that I would draw your serious attention. Thousands of wealthy people congregate in the villages round our large towns -doctors by dozens follow in their wake, andalthough many are talented, experienced menyet we never find more than two in each village or small town are enabled to support the respectability of life - and they, by some extraordinary perversity of human nature, are very frequently the least entitled by their knowledge and experience to occupy the proud distinction ; — thus is greatness thrust on shoulders unsuited to the weight.

Many people imitate the parson and the squire in making their selection of a doctor-while

others take the opinion of the tailor or the butcher: thus, the parson sends for Mr. Bluster because the squire employs him—the lawyer and the merchant send for him because the parson does-and the little traders and the hangers-on of private families employ him because their patrons do. But the grand registers for doctors in want of patients, and patients in search of doctors, are the village chemist and the monthly nurse. The chemist is commonly looked upon by the public as a branch of the medical tree, or a chip of the old block, and is presumed in some mysterious way to understand the relative amount of pith and sap within the parent tree. But what the Betsy Prigs and Sarey Gamps can tell of doctors' qualities I am at a total loss to know unless it be the estimation in which the medical trees were held in the several nurseries in which they have been employed.

If, however, you wish to meet with the most intelligent doctors in a town or village, you must not listen to popular clamour, nor be guided by popular prejudice, nor popular opinion. If you hear any doctor especially decried, you may at once suspect that he is a dangerous opponent to some other doctor, and that you are conversing with that doctor's friends. The clique, which ever supports and recommends

the men who take the cream of practice, aré particularly jealous of any strange doctor who comes upon the scene, and more especially if he be a man of some ability. Remember that men seldom speak disparagingly of those they do not fear.

How, you will

say, are we to ascertain who are the men most fit to be entrusted with our lives, if we must neither listen to popular clamour-village chemists-nor monthly nurses? I must confess the difficulty to be great, as the law now stands; but when a public registry is kept of all the doctors' qualifications, and their dates, it will enable the public to make their own selection. As things are, you can but do your best; and I should recommend you to inquire of some respectable professional man of standing, who resides at a sufficient distance to be uninfluenced by that terrible feeling of jealousy which pervades the ranks of medicine. At all events, you should not run to Mrs. Smith's nurse or Mrs. Brown's cook Mrs. Jones's housemaid—to ask what doctor to employ; for if you do, you are sure as fate to have some young or inexperienced man and, judging all from one, you will-as others have done before-condemn en masse the country surgeons. This is the reason why you cannot

or

travel by a train without hearing the whole race of country doctors ridiculed and abused.

But it is most unjust to judge them all from one. Have not the greatest men of modern times been country surgeons? Are there not many of our first-rate men, now practising in London, who but a few short years ago were country doctors?

It is too bad to condemn a class of men merely because it contains specimens of the rough-and-ready doctor-the young and inexperienced doctor—and the effeminate mediocrity, who prides himself on tight boots, spotless gloves, and matchless coat, and who turns his nose up in disgust at the unwholesome odour of the patient's room. They are not all like these, and yet they are all condemned as quite unfit to wait upon the dog or cat of second-hand Gentility. Without this sweeping censure of the thoughtless, the doctor's course is difficult enough. The trials and the tasks of life are not all patent to the world. Many a branching oak-rejoicing in its mighty strength-may have a cankering worm just gnawing at its root; and many a man, with every prospect of obtaining fame, may have his reputation undermined by some repulsive-looking outcast of mankind.

I will now address myself to the pill-taking