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language of hyperbole to say that he invented Russia. His merits as a wise statesman and legislator far surpass his defects as a tyrant. In such a kingdom as his, tyranny was the kindliest rule. Individuals might have to suffer, but the principles of justice such tyranny as Peter's vindicated and defended are benefits and blessings to the end of time. He was an untutored genius who had to create an ideal of kingcraft for himself; and if he failed let readers judge. If

an apology is needed for his frailties, rough methods, boorishness of mind, barbarianism, the apology we offer is that he took the shape the conditions of Russian society and the environment around him would permit - that these defects belonged rather to his times than. to himself; while whatever of good he was or great he did, was the result of the throes of his own groping and darkly struggling spirit, earnest intellect, and determined will.-Belgravia Magazine.

LITERATURE AND MEDICINE.

In the beautiful fiction of the Greeks, Esculapius, the tutelary god of medicine, was the son of Apollo, the tutelary god of poetry and culture, and as far back as the memory of man can travel have the two deities walked, with Mercy in their train, their gracious way together. Cruel and capricious is our sovereign mistress Fortune, harsh and very arbitrary it would seem are the other divinities that shape our ends, but these two beneficent powers have never failed to bless and shelter us. Between the forces that envy and dissolve-ever militant against our peace and joy-have Apollo and his son stood before us in the gap. One welcomed us into the world, and the other makes the world lovely to us, wrapping us in his glory and life and light, while he may. But when we wax faint and weary, as we must, then is Apollo's true son at our side soothing, encouraging, sympathising; and even when the Fates have worked their wills upon the shattered frame, and we are passing beyond the reach of healing hands down the dark lonely road, he removes what obstacles he can, and smoothes, loyal to the last, the stormy passage to the grave. Nor have the servants of these kindred deities been unmindful of the ties which connect them, and the relation between Medicine and Literature forms one of the most interesting episodes in the history of Letters. They are not perhaps so intimately related now as they once were. We have many men distinguished, both in Medicine and Surgery, but we shall not be guilty of disrespect to the faculty if we say that very few manage to temper the severer pursuits of

science with the graceful accomplishments of the scholar. In an age like the present, when there is so much technical knowledge to be mastered, and when it must be difficult for a hard-worked practitioner to keep pace with the ever-increasing discoveries which are every day throwing light on his own pursuits, it can hardly be expected that he should find time to sacrifice in any way to the Muses. Still, considering how closely associated the medical profession has been with literature, as well by its original contributions as by its affectionate intercourse with men of genius, one cannot help feeling a sort of regret at this compulsory estrangement, and indulging a hope that some day or other the two pursuits may resume their old intimacy. And now, reader, with your leave, we will devote a few pages to the Literature of Physic, and recall the names of some of those who divided their impartial sacrifices between Delos and Epidaurus.

Porson used to say that there was no better reading than the works of the Greek physicians; and if he would have consented to exclude Galen and Paulus Ægineta, we should be disposed to cordially agree with him. Hippocrates and Aretaus may be perused and reperused with delight by any one who has any interest in morbid pathology and its delineation. The first, who was a contemporary of Pericles, and who flourished therefore when style and literary skill had reached their climax of perfection, has left a large mass of writings behind him. It is not always easy to discriminate between his spurious and genuine offspring, it is true, and he has doubtless been made responsible for much that he

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never wrote. But the Aphorisms' are certainly his, and if they contain much that will amuse, they contain much useful instruction. There is nothing sounder or weightier in all literature than the first : Life is short, and the art is long, the occasion fleeting, experience fallacious, and judgment difficult. The physician must not only be prepared to do what is right himself, but also to make the patient, the attendants and externals co-operate." His treatise 'On the Prognostics,' a masterpiece of minute and vigorous descriptive power, contains a passage which recalls with sad exactness a scene witnessed by too many of us. "When in acute fevers, pneumonia, phrenitis, or headache, the hands are waved before the face, hunting through empty space, as if gathering bits of straw, picking the nap from the coverlet, or tearing chaff from the wall, all such symptoms are bad and deadly.' A keen, curious, and close observer, a shrewd, sagacious, and practical man, a thoughtful and philosophic student of human nature, a master of terse and lucid speech was this, the father of medicine. If he is to be numbered among the ornaments of his profession, he merits a place among the ornaments of prose literature. Aretæus, too, is another medical writer whose literary excellence takes him out of the narrower sphere of a merely technical exponent of his art. This master of graphic composition flourished in the second century. He wrote, like Hippocrates, in Ionic Greek. He was evidently a man who combined as thorough a knowledge of his profession as was then pos sible, with a liberal love for poetry and the belles-lettres. A humane and tenderhearted man, he often pauses to lainent the helplessness of the surgeon when confronted with some forms of suffering, and to express his sympathy with the agonies he is unable to relieve. delineator of disease he has never been equalled, except perhaps by Sydenham, and his account of tetanus (Acute Diseases, Book I.), of elephantiasis (Chronic Diseases, Book II.), and of

phthisis (Chronic Diseases, Book I.) rank among the miracles of verbal delineation. They are not merely triumphs of technical diagnosis; they are pictures which haunt the imagination like a nightmare; they can never be forgotten. With the slow and painful elaboration of Balzac, Aretæus has all his potency in general effect; he not only brings the sufferer before our eyes, but he makes us feel and hear and almost share his tortures-his despair-his degradation,

every detail of them. We close his book with horror and boundless admiration. As it is no part of this paper to deal with the history of medicine, we shall merely say of the illustrious Cornelius Celsus, that in purity and elegance of style he need fear no comparison with any of his contemporaries, though Livy and Nepos were probably among them. To Asclepiades, whose charms as a man and whose eloquence as a writer have been celebrated by Cicero, we can only allude. Of the writings of Antonius Musa, the physician of Augustus, Mæcenas, Virgil, and Horace, nothing has come down to us, but as long as Time shall be will his name belong to literature. For he, it was well known, was described by the grateful Virgil, in the twelfth book of the Eneid, under the name of Iapis. Aëtius, Oribasius, Alexander Trallianus, and others over whom we may not linger will bring us to times comparatively modern.

First among the moderns will stand the accomplished and versatile Jerome Fracastoro. Born in 1483, he was preserved to the world by a miracle, for when he was still an infant his mother was struck dead by a flash of lightning, while he, nestling in her bosom, escaped unscathed. His Latin poetry was the glory of an age which could boast of the composition of Politian and Bembo, and to the sedulous and successful cultivation As a of the fine arts he added an intimate acquaintance with astronomy and mathematics, while at the same time he was the most eminent physician in Italy. For many years statues of him towered up in the public squares of Padua and Verona, that they might serve as a continual memento of him, and as an incentive to the pursuit of literary eminence." Nor must we pass by Jerome Cardan, the daring enthusiast "who

*"For after I saw him fumble with the sheets and play with flowers, I knew there was but one way," says poor Mrs. Quickly of him whom she would fain have kept even from "Arthur's bosom."

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cast the horoscope of our Saviour, and subjected Him to the stars, to whom all stars are subject." In his restless and indefatigable life there was scarcely a department of human knowledge into which he did not force himself. He was, he says, born to release the world from the manifold errors under which it groaned, and ten folio volumes testify his energy and ambition. The labors of fanatics are heavily discounted by Time, but mathematics will for ever be Cardan's debtor. Physical science will thank him for removing, if he did not correct, many errors, and the student of human nature must be sincerely grateful for the most curious and extraordinary autobiography in existence. In Julius Cæsar Scaliger Medicine may boast one of its brightest scholastic ornaments, though, curiously enough, he began the study of neither medicine nor Greek till he was forty. Crudity and vigor characterise both the man and his writings, as his son's account of him and his own 'Poetics' amply prove; but the whole history of letters have no such portentous phenomenon to show as the catalogue of the works produced by this man between the age of forty-when, racked with gout, he began the Greek alphabet -and seventy-four, when he succumbed to his cruel foe. Five years before him died another physician, the immortal François Rabelais. Rabelais' translations from Hippocrates and Galen have long sunk below soundings. He wrote them to get a practice which never came. One is not altogether surprised at his contemporaries hesitating about entrusting their lives to the actual or potential author of The Lives, Heroic Deeds, and Sayings of Gargantua and Pantagruel.' He was never a good hand at patching up a farce, and was, with all his boisterous merriment, glad enough when his own was played out. Light lie the earth on François Rabelais, for light and merry has he made her children!

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Crossing over to England, we are confronted with another son of Esculapius, whose name can never be mentioned without pride by his countrymen-Dr. Thomas Linacre, the pupil of Politian and Chalcondylas, the friend of Erasmus, More, and Colet, the first teacher of Greek at Oxford, the initiator of the Renaissance in England. His enlight

ened and active mind seems to have traversed the whole range of human learning. He gave us our first correct version from Aristotle and Galen, he busied himself with divinity and philology, he translated Proclus on the Sphere, and in pure and perspicuous Latinity he treated of medicine and physical science in works which are still consulted by the curious. His amiable temper, his unostentatious charities, and his generous philanthropy have elicited glowing eulogies from more than one of his illustrious contemporaries. His tomb may still be seen in St. Paul's Cathedral, erected by another scholar for whom Medicine need never blushDr. John Caius. Contemporary with these great men was Sir Thomas Elyot, a physician of whom Literature may be justly proud. His Castle of Health' was the first popular book on Medicine in our language, his Bibliotheca Eliota' our first good dictionary, and his 'Governour,' a sort of moral and ethical treatise, may still be read with interest. The faculty were, it seems, very angry with Elyot for divulging their secrets and for vulgarising medicine by writing about it in English. To which he manfully replied that "it was no more shame for a person of quality to be the author of a book on the science of physic than it was for King Henry VIII. to publish a book on the science of grammar, which he had lately done." He was an intimate friend of Sir Thomas More, and was one of the most accomplished scholars in Europe. We should like to say a word about Dr. Thomas Phair, the translator of Virgil, and one of the authors of The Mirrour for Magistrates,' about William Bulleyn and his Bulwark of Defence, &c.,' about Dr. William Cunningham and his 'Whetstone of Wit' and 'Castle of Knowledge,' and about Reginald Scot and his curious' Discoverie of Witchcraft,' but space forbids. As we propose to take the poets together, we shall, for the present, pass on to the great name of Thomas Sydenham. It is, perhaps, a little singular that, with the exception of Sydenham, no English physician has published a work on his own art which is entitled to a place among classical compositions, and which may be read with interest by the nonprofessional student. Sydenham's trea

tises, however, like those of Hippocrates and Aretæus, may be perused with delight by every intelligent scholar. Their facile, copious, and masculine Latinity, their graphic pictures of disease, the striking reflections which relieve the course of the technical narrative, their autobiographical interest, must come home to every one. In him were revived the literary graces which make the works of the great Cappadocian and Celsus so fascinating and delightful to the general reader. With him, however, perished the art no other medical works have been prevented by their style from being altogether forgotten by literature in being superseded in science.

But if ever Apollo and the Muses cared for mortal bantling, mild was their glance on the cradle of another future physician, who first saw the light in Cheapside, about the middle of October 1605, for then came there, into a world which was to be so beautiful to him, Sir Thomas Browne. How shall we deal with him-how describe him-him, the author of the 'Religio Medici,' the Hydriotaphia,' the Vulgar Errors,' the Quincunx,' the charming "Letters"? Quaintest and best of moralists, truest, deepest, sincerest of philosophers, a Plato without his sophistry, a Seneca without his tinsel. Shall we call him, in Southey's measured phrase, "the greatest prose poet in this or in any other language," or echo Lamb's loving eulogies, or Coleridge's rapturous praise, or Lytton's eloquent panegyric? Shall we enlarge on his boundless learning, as curious and recondite as Burton's, on his originality in treating even commonplace as rich and racy as Montaigne's, on his aphorisms as piercing and pithy as Tacitus and Bacon's, on his majestic eloquence, soaring as high as Plato's or Jeremy Taylor's when their wing is strongest? This, all this, will his lovers claim for him, but deeper still lies the subtle charm of his genius. The man, says Goethe, is always greater than his works, and never did literary expression less reflect the breathing soul than in Browne's style. Not a thought that weighs like lead on the solitary thinker but weighed heavily on him, and cruel were the agonies he struggled through; he has told us all about them in that strange diction of his, with the

garrulous simplicity of a child, but he conquered, he says, on his knees. He might "count the world not an inn, but an hospital, not a place to live but to die in," but he learnt to "return to his Creator the duty of a devout and learned admiration." In the active practice of his profession he saw, as a philosopher, much of human weakness, as a physician much of human suffering; but the duties of the physician he tempered with the liberal sympathies of a Christian philosopher. With his hand on the patient's pulse-they are his own words-he could not help thinking of his soul, and "forgot his province. At the age of seventy-seven, leaving posterity the precious legacy of his writings, he ceased to be mortal, "ready to be anything in the ecstasy of being ever and as content with six feet as with the moles of Adrianus."

We have other names to mention, but Browne was the prince of literary physicians. In striking contrast to him stands Bernard Mandeville, who scandalised the hypocrites of the eighteenth century by his paradoxical work entitled 'The Fable of the Bees.' He is not read now so much as he used to be, but in nervous vigor, irony, logic, and satire he is not unworthy of comparison with his brother cynic, Swift. His opinion of his fellow-creatures is not encouraging; perhaps his professional experiences furnished him with the hint for his great doctrine, that private vices are public benefits.

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The treatises of Dr. Charleton-we beg his pardon for not mentioning him before- are now chiefly remembered from Dryden's allusion to one of them, though his Brief Discourses concerning the different arts of Men' has pointed many a paragraph in modern social essays, for which the judicious plagiarist has had the credit. Never did a more accomplished or more lovable man pen a prescription than the once famous Dr. Samuel Garth, the friend of Dryden, Pope, and Steele, the noble philanthropist, who, when at the top of his profession, practised among the poor for nothing, the scholarly translator of Ovid, the ingenious author of one of the best mock heroic poems in Europe, the poet who passed the heroic couplet perfect into the hands of Pope. Alas for human fame, who now turns over the

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deserted pages of The Dispensary '? and yet it contains lines which would do credit to the highest names in literature. But Garth was not the first poet-physician. That honor must be claimed by Dr. Andrew Borde, whose dismal lucubrations lulled the ears of the good people in Henry VIII.'s reign. His Breviary of Health' is not exhilarating, yet he could tell a good tale as well as any one, and he has the doubtful honor of being the Christian name of the original of the term Merry Andrew,' as another physician, Paracelsus, has furnished us with the term bombast. Over Dr. Thomas Lodge we must pause for a moment. His Fig for Momus' is one of the earliest series of satires in our language; some of his lyrics are divine (turn, reader, to his stanzas on ' Beauty' and to Rosalynde's Madrigal'), and his pretty prose-tale Rosalynde; or, Euphue's Golden Legacy,' had the honor of furnishing Shakespeare with the plot of As You Like It.' One would like to have known something, by the way, of Shakespeare's son-in-law, Dr. Hall, for if he wrote the epitaphs

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attributed to him in Stratford Church he must have been a man of no ordinary, accomplishments. Nor must we pass unnoticed that indefatigable physician, Philemon Holland, who though no poet himself was the cause of poetry in others. This unwearied scholar was not only a practising physician, but a schoolmaster as well, and managed in the intervals of his double vocation to present the world with complete versions of 'Livy,' Pliny's Natural History,' Plutarch's Morals,' Suetonius's Lives of the Cæsars,' Ammianus Marcellinus, Xenophon'sCyropædia,' and Camden's Britannia,' with other works beside! He died, in his prime so to speak, aged eighty-six, having never had occasion to wear spectacles, and meditating other translations. Truly they were giants in those days; if Hygeia hid her secrets, she revealed her presence. Perhaps the faculty have no great reason to be proud of the irrepressible Sir Richard Blackmore, who, undismayed by the savage onslaughts first of Dryden and subsequently of Pope, complacently produced poems as fast as the world forgot them. His Prince Arthur,' his Alfred,' and his Eliza' were given up

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even by his admirers, but his 'Creation' was considered by Dennis superior to the De Rerum Naturâ,' was described by Addison as one of the most useful and noble productions in our English verse, and has elicited a warm eulogy from Dr. Johnson. Let those read it who can. Most of poor Blackmore's lucubrations, as he loved to call them, were written in his coach while he was hurrying from patient to patient-or, as Pope maliciously puts it, "written to the rumbling of his chariot wheels." What Blackmore was in verse that was Sir John Hill in prose. To us this unwearied scribbler-who among other things had tried his hand at writing farces-is best known by Garrick's epigram,

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Yet he began well with a translation. of Theophrastus's Treatise on Gems,' and his Vegetable System,' in twentysix folios, representing no less than twenty-six thousand figures or plants drawn from nature, deserves the gratitude of botanists. His squabbles with the Royal Society, with Fielding, Smart, and others amused the literary world of London for many years. Poor Christopher Smart gave it him well in a satire (the 'Hilliad '),* which is still worth reading, and from which Disraeli gives some amusing extracts. Essays, farces, novels, epigrams, libels, dissertations, learned treatises, scurrilous pamphlets, letters, and even sermons flowed in unbroken succession from Hill's facile pen, and a catalogue of his writings would be the catalogue of no inconsiderable library. His proper place, however, was and now is with his brother quack who disgraced another profession - Orator Henley. It is a relief to turn to Dr. Arbuthnot, of whose splendid genius and sweet temper Swift, niggard in praise though he was, could say to Pope, "He has more wit than we all have, and his

* Describing him in these complimentary lines:

"On mere privation she (Nature) bestow'd a frame,

And dignified a nothing with a name,
A wretch devoid of use, of sense, of grace,
The insolvent tenant of encumber'd space!''

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