humanity is equal to his wit." Those who can relish polished satire, delicate and exquisite humor, will turn again and again to the shabby old volumes, guiltless as yet of reprint, which contain The History of John Bull,' The Treatise Concerning the Altercation or Scolding of the Ancients,' and 'The Art of Political Lying.' There probably never existed an author more careless about literary distinction; Pope and Swift had during his lifetime, and have had ever since, the credit of having produced much of Arbuthnot's best and most characteristic work. We are for instance as confident that Arbuthnot wrote the introduction and opening chapters of Martinus Scriblerus as if we had seen the letters wet from his pen. There is no mistaking his touch, and yet every one goes on assigning those masterly pages to Swift or Pope. As a man this humorist-physician seems to have approached perfection as nearly as was ever permitted to our erring race. Well might the arch cynic exclaim when Arbuthnot's placid and benevolent figure, noble heart, and guileless life came up before his memory, "If the world had but a dozen Arbuthnots in it, I would burn my Gulliver's Travels.'

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There was another future physician, "whose humanity was equal to his wit, romping along Irish lanes when Arbuthnot was passing to his rest down the dark road which he had brightened for so many-for was not Oliver Goldsmith an M.D.? But whither are we straying? Cowley's slighted ghost whispers that he too- the darling of Dryden's youth" -the Pindar of England, "the lord of the metaphysical school," the most fascinating of English essayists, was one of the faculty. He did not get much practice, we are told: he probably preferred the fields of Chertsey and the pleasant rooms of the Royal Society-where he could pick up the Reverend Mr. Sprat for an evening's carouse-to the sickchamber and the querulous patient. Lovers of Italian poetry will not forget to couple with Cowley Francis Redi, whose Bacco in Toscana' is one of the most delightful "Pindarics" in the world. He was for many years Court physician to Ferdinand II. and Cosmo III. Returning now to the eighteenth century, we must not omit Dr. Mark

Akenside, the author of 'The Pleasures of Imagination,' a poem which must always rank among the gems of didactic poetry-a haughty and scholarly soul, one of the few poets of the eighteenth century who had drunk deep at Greek fountains. Had he not frittered away his genius in writing tame lyrics, and had he devoted himself to satire, he might have rivalled the masterpieces of Juvenal and Dryden; so thought Macaulay, and so will think every one who turns to the picture of Pulteney, mangled and battered in the ruthless couplets of Curio.' Akenside's blank verse is charming, and we shall have to go back to the Elizabethan masters to find anything so plastic, so richly cadenced, so variously harmonious. His Inscriptions' and his Hymn to the Naides are more thoroughly Hellenic than anything English literature had to show since Milton. We wonder they are not selected for translations at the Universities. He appears to have been more successful as a poet than as a medical practitioner, and one of the retorts he got from a recalcitrant patient is worth recording. "Doctor," said the wag, "after all your remarks, my opinion of your profession is this: the ancients endeavored to make it a science and failed, and the moderns to make it a trade and succeeded." Smollett ungratefully introduced him in Peregrine Pickle' as Dr. Smelfungus.

Contemporary with Akenside, and intimately acquainted with him, was Dr. Armstrong, whose taciturnity has been immortalised by Thomson, whose surliness and cynicism seem to have furnished Abernethy with a model, and whose genius is evinced in The Art of Preserving Health.' He began his career with The Economy of Love,' a poem which speaks more for his honesty than for his tact and delicacy. Besides his chef-d'œuvre just alluded to-a poem which in spite of its prolixity abounds in really eloquent passages-he produced a volume of essays, a number of medical treatises, and several miscellaneous pieces. He favored the public also with some verses which he was pleased to call Imitations of Shakespeare.'

Next on our list stands Dr. James Grainger, whose ode on Solitude, praised so highly by Johnson, who paid

the author the high compliment of repeating" with great energy" the exordium, was also one of the favorite poems of Nathaniel Hawthorne. His didactic poem The Sugar Cane' has gone the way of his friend Smart's 'Hop Garden.' It is a curious monument of the misplaced ingenuity of the eighteenth century. Addison observes of Virgil that he tosses about his manure with an air of majesty, and poor Grainger's attempts to be majestic over receipts for a compost of weeds, mould and stale, and over the symptoms and cure of the yaws, his bathetic line, "Now, Muse, let's sing of rats," was too much for the gravity of a polite circle at Sir Joshua Reynolds's who had been assembled to hear the poet read his manuscript. His description, however, of a hurricane and earthquake, and his episodic tale of Junio and Theana, have been justly commended by Chalmers, but The Sugar Cane' has, we fear, sunk below extracts. His version of Tibullus is sometimes happy, though what poetical powers he had were probably quenched by hack-work and professional struggles. He died at St. Christopher's in December 1767. In Tobias Smollett Medicine must recognise one of its brightest literary ornaments, and his admirers are not likely to complain of the neglect of their favorite, though since Dickens made his appearance it may be questioned whether there is any one who could, like Porson, repeat whole scenes from his novels. Dickens's more refined humor has spoiled us for the coarser and more homely work of the Scotch surgeon, yet is the day far distant when Strap, and Pipes, and Commodore Trunnion, and Bowling, and Lismahago, and Mathew Bramble shall cease to charm. What wondrous vitality this man must have had, what hardships he struggled through, proudly and silently. No wonder he wagged a bitter tongue, and wielded an irritable and caustic pen. He knew men far too well to respect them, though one could have wished that there had been a little more of the generous tolerance, the higher tone, the nobler spirit of Henry Fielding, in his rough transcripts from life. There goes a story that he once went to visit his mother in disguise after a period of long absence, and that

she recognised him by "his old roguish smile." It is this roguish smile that lights up every page of his writings, plays over all the sordid scenes and dismal holes in which his genius too often loves to linger. He died world-worn, exhausted, at Leghorn in 1781, aged only fifty-one. Could he have held out for a year or two longer he would have ended his toilsome days-and his arduous struggles with poverty-on a handsome estate in the enjoyment of a handsome competence. Six years before Smollett died there passed away another physician whose memory is still preserved at Cambridge by the medals given annually for Greek and Latin Odes and Epigrams; this was Sir William Browne. In all the annals of eccentricity it would be difficult to find his match. He was an excellent scholar, and is the author of numberless treatises on literary, political, and scientific subjects. When Foote introduced him in his Devil upon Two Sticks,' and made him the laughing-stock of half London, instead of being offended the good doctor sent the cruel wag a card complimenting him on his successful caricature, but adding that, as he had forgotten his muff, he took the liberty of sending him the very one he wore, to complete the resemblance. In his will, which was written in a medley of Greek, Latin, and English, his devotion to Horace is singularly illustrated. On my coffin when in the grave I desire may be deposited in its leather-case my pocket Elzevir Horace -Comes viæ vitæque dulcis at utilis, worn out with and by me." He used to say that he preferred St. Luke to all the Evangelists, because of the purity of his Greek, and he made no doubt that Dr. Friend was quite right when he asserted that this purity arose from the Apostle's professional familiarity with the writings of the Greek physician. Towards the end of the eighteenth century another physician was beginning his literary career at Lichfield-Dr. Erasmus Darwin, once one of the most popular poets in England. In some respects a foolish and eccentric man, he yet managed to accomplish a good deal of solid work in the seventy years during which he wrote and practised.

His

Botanic Garden' and Loves of the Plants,' his miscellaneous pieces, and

his Temple of Nature,' are poems full of splendid and sonorous declamation, and are perhaps the most successful attempts to embody the truths of science in verse which have ever been made in English. His high-flown and extravagant style was inimitably parodied by Canning and Frere in the Loves of the Triangles,' but it ought not to be forgotten that from this poet-doctor Campbell learned the principles of his versification. His great, his damning defect is his want of variety and repose: like Claudian, he cloys by his monotonous sweetness; like Gibbon and Macaulay, he wearies by his unrelieved brilliance. Nor must we forget Dr. John Moorethe father of the hero of Corunna. His voluminous works are now almost forgotten-yet two of them at least scarcely deserve such a fate. In his Zeluco' he illustrates with no common power the eternal truth that vice is but gilded woe, and that in spite of all appearances to the contrary the prosperity of the scoundrel is hollow and unreal; in another novel, Edward,' he reverses the picture: they are both drawn from the life, and are the fruits, it is easy to see, of minute personal observation operating on exceptionally wide experience. In John Leyden, another surgeon, Sir William Jones might have found a rival in Oriental lore, and English literature lost a graceful and accomplished poet. We have often thought that Sir Walter Scott's memoir of this young scholar-who died before his time at Batavia, in Java, August 28, 1811, is the most delightful of his miscellaneous works. Everybody knows the lines in The Lord of the Isles':

"Quench'd is his lamp of varied lore,

That loved the light of song to pour :
A distant and a deadly shore

Has Leyden's cold remains." Dr. Walcot, better known as as Peter Pindar, very soon exchanged medicine for preaching, though he appears to have been equally unsuccessful in both. The doctor had a living presented to him in Jamaica, by his patron Sir William Trelawny, but he soon emptied the church.' He used to give his congregation ten minutes, and when after that time no one appeared, he and his clerk would betake themselves to the sea-shore to shoot ring-tailed pigeons.

He lies quiet enough now in St. Paul's, Covent Garden, but for many years he poured out series after series of libels and satires which have no parallel for venomous scurrility, coarse and boisterous humor, audacious invective, and manifold ability. They used to make poor George III. and all good Tories shake in their shoes. In striking contrast to this witty reprobate stand those respectable physicians - Mason Good, Beddoes, Currie, and Madden-who contributed much interesting_matter to miscellaneous literature. The first translated Lucretius into blank verse; the second was the author of the once famous essay on Health; the third was the first to introduce Robert Burns to the notice of the English public; and the fourth wrote an interesting work on the 'Infirmities of Men of Genius.' Bonnel Thornton, the translator of Plautus, and the author of some of the best papers in the Connoisseur, deserves notice, and so also does the learned and indefatigable Dr. Aikin. John Locke, Crabbe, and Keats prepared themselves for surgeons, and so consequently form links in the golden chain, and Lever and Samuel Warren also walked the hospitals. Nor must we forget that SainteBeuve, the prince of French critics, is also to be numbered among the votaries of Medicine.

But there is another point at which the two professions touch, and this forms one of the most pleasing passages in the annals of literature; we mean the relationship between men of genius so often stricken with bodily ailments, and those whose care and duty it is "to stand between man and his doom." Who can forget Dryden's grateful acknowledgment of the services of Hobbes and Guibbons? or Cheselden's goodness to Pope? or Meade's to Gay? or Arbuthnot's to every literary man with whom he came into contact. "There is no end of my kind treatment from the faculty," writes Pope, a few weeks before he died; "they are in general the most amiable companions, and the best friends as well as most learned men I know."

Brocklesby's tender and devoted attention to Johnson and Burke was as honorable to the faculty as to literature. He even offered, in his noble admiration of