ling buckles, adopting the modern finical convenience of shoestrings; and very lately reduced his looped hat to a mere broad brim. But this is probably the last revolution which fashion will effect in his costume. It is remarkable, that with scarcely more spare time than a laborious mechanic, and always liable to surprises, yet no emergency detects him in dishabille; he is equally neat at a midnight accouchement, or a noon-day visit. He is of a temper eminently placid, quiet as a sick-room, to which he is so much accustomed, for he takes especial care to shun the clamours of grief, and generally contrives to avoid being "in at the death." Nothing arouses him to vehemence or enthusiasm. He has no theories to maintain, nor any thing to do with medical polemics. He is an equable admirer of things as they are; and the usual eruptive topics "pass by him as the idle wind." But he is fond of a gossip, and is upon equally good terms with Tory, Whig, and Radical. Yet this subdued temperament is exposed to many excitations from the irascible subjects of his skill, and he submits, that to call them patients is a misnomer-they should be called petulant-for, in fact, he is the real patient. He has to deal with all kinds of dispositions, at a time when they are most irritable and unreasonable. Some expect, that to consult the Doctor is to be made whole again without delay. They seem to think him versed in the mysteries of the Cabala, and receive his prescription as a talisman; of course, they have but little patience with the tedious processes of sublunary art. He is held responsible for the wilfulness of some, and the carelessness of others. He must submit to the experience of the valetudinarian, and show a becoming deference to the wisdom of the book-learned. The one is dissatisfied if not cured his own way; the other never thinks himself cured at all: the valetudinarian, like the doctor, lives upon complaints. Medical books are sources of considerable revenue to him: the vain consult them for remedies applicable to their cases, and the timid to know if they are ill or well. They are both good friends to the faculty. With Nature, though she plays him many scurvy tricks, he is in the main upon excellent terms. He knows very well that she at least effects as many cures as she thwarts; and that if she does occasionally disgrace him, and expose the impotency of his art, by falsifying his most confident predictions, and cutting short his most profitable cases, yet he frequently reaps the benefit of her handy-work, when he has least expectation of her favours. She will sometimes restore a distempered fancy, and the bodily affliction ceases of course, leaving the doctor the credit of removing, what, in truth, never existed. A lucky omission of the nurse, or the well-timed obstinacy of a patient, sometimes promotes a cure which the doctor would have marred. To children he is the very 66 fee, faw, fum!" They dread him more than they do the birch, old bogy, raw-head-and-bloody-bones, or

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all the phantasmagoria of the nursery. They shrink from him as they do from poor blacky, or the old-clothes-man. They are more afraid of him than the edge of a knife, or a hot cinder. Indeed, who can see him without thinking of blisters, leeches, lancets, and his whole catalogue of execrables? Tender, affable, and polite as he is, his aspect creates nausea. He says himself, he thinks he never receives a hearty welcome, but when he is taking leave; and believes there are many who "rather bear those ills they have," than take the doctor or his physic. But it is fortunate that doctors cannot gild the pill, unless it be for themselves; they cannot sweeten their remedies; consequently, those who are fond of doctoring are rare, and are not to be found in the juvenile classes: in youth, the feelings are too acute, and the palate too sensitive; or the extra indulgencies, and exemption from school duties, would be tempting premiums to voluntary sickness. But, with all these points of repulsion, he is seldom long absent if he once obtains footing in a family. To effect this, he desires nothing better than to see the lady safely through the straw with a son and heir; they have then "a friend in the line;" and he is recommended to all acquaintance as a nice man:" he adheres like a blister, and sometimes "draws" as painfully: like that stinging application, he wounds while he cures: he establishes a raw" upon the mind. To have a family doctor, engenders a propensity to consult him; besides, he always takes care to illustrate the "dangers of delay," and enforce the propriety of the "earliest application," upon the first symptoms of any derangement of the physical system; and who can deny that many have come to an untimely end from not having taken "some advice" in proper time. One cannot reconcile it to one's conscience to refuse the means of prolonging existence, when placed so commodiously within reach. Whatever philosophical or religious indifference for life we may know ourselves to possess, yet there are always some dear or equitable claims upon our conservation which we think it criminal to neglect; we can always find some generous and disinterested reason for taking care of ourselves; and certainly there is no telling what may be the consequence of suffering a pimple to "come to a head." And though it cannot be denied that frequent success attends the old wife's specific, of extra blankets and watergruel, yet we all know that cold is the ground-work of mortality, and ought not to be trifled with; however just and well-founded may be our reliance upon a good dose of Epsoms, we soon begin to think it proper that he should regulate the precise time and quantity of our Spring and Autumnal doses, because he "knows our constitutions." Adventurous and heedless boys scruple not. to staunch a cut-finger with a dirty cobweb; but we cannot be certain of the " state of one's blood," and it is better to pay the doctor for preventing a mortification, than for arresting its pro

gress by amputation. Then again, it is so delightful to talk, by the hour together, with an intelligent and reasonable friend, upon that most interesting and never-varying theme, ourselves. He is indulgent to all our weaknesses, for it is he who sees heroes tamed, and beauties withered; pride humbled, and obstinacy subdued; pain superadded to guilt; innocence in prolonged torture, such as human malice could not inflict: and amidst the decay of mortal excellence, the writhings of sense and distortion of intellect, he is unmoved, but not unhumanized;" he neither loses his love for man, nor his confidence in heaven: he has no time to be sentimental; he is occupied in watching the turns and windings of disease, and tracing its causes, not in lamenting its effects; his emotions are suppressed, to keep his faculties unclouded; he calculates upon life and death as calmly as upon a mathematical problem; amidst the ravings of pain, and the horrors of despair, he still maintains the even tenor of his thoughts; he is at the helm of mortality in its greatest perils, and is unappalled by the most tempestuous seasons.

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But his chief patrons, the most confiding believers in his skill; the most relying and copious recipients of his alteratives, lenitives, emollients, anodynes, and all the gentleness of physic, are the ladies. With them he is always at home, to them he is ever welcome; in the drawing-room or the boudoir, in dress or in dishabille, for "Doctors, you know, are but old women.' He is so affable, so attentive, such an exemplary listener, never provokingly suggests that any of their ills may be imaginary, and yet is always consolatory. If a lady, in an "interesting situation," should be interestingly alarmed, he will say, "Madam, I am attending at a birth, not a death." When a young lady is apprehensive of the threatened ravages of the small pox, he will assure her it shall not leave a speck behind, but that she shall live to become a formidable rival of his, and be more killing than the doctor. He tells a love-sick maid, hers are not "medicable wounds;" and that she holds herself the charms that kill and cure. He is the lady's vade mecum; an animated "Domestic Medicine." She takes his conversation, and throws away his physic. She consults him for the vapours, which his visit dispels; and, when "the mixture" arrives, is dressing for a dance. It is a great relief to talk with a gentleman who has the privilege of an old woman: she can tell of all her little ailments, and, in enumerating, forget them. He says their maladies are often not more than skin deep; but he tells them that the finest of all cosmetics is health. Gentle exercise and rational occupation are the best clearers of the complexion and refiners of the shape. Cheerfulness sets off a bright eye better than a pencilled brow; while nothing renders it less piercing than ennui. The opera spoils a complexion sooner than hay-making. He thinks a tapering waist although "fine by degrees, and beautifully less,"

scarcely worth a consumption; and is surprised at the eager, ness with which they expose a fine person to the rheumatics.

No one at heart despises the doctor; but like some other useful members of society, he is particularly obnoxious to vulgar ridicule. No one is so merry at the expense of a tailor as a dandy, and yet to that meritorious artist he owes all he has "that may become a man;" his make and shape, his "form and pressure;" his very personal identity: he is the tailor's handy-work, who sets his mark upon him, and knows him for his own. So it is with the doctor. The most extravagant and impudent pretensions of the empiric are the most implicitly received by the professed sceptics in the power of medicine; and the more he pro mises, the more is he trusted. Let but an arm shake, or colic twist them, and they are his most abject devotees,

MY FRIEND;

A SKETCH OF CHARACTER.

SHADE of Rabelais, merriest spirit of a "a ryghte merrie and conceited" nation, flutter about me, and guide my pen, while it feebly draws the lines of likeness of a wit whom thou wouldst have called thy younger brother! And thou, the sentimentalist, the humorist, the wit, the fine-minded, the merciful Sterne; thou who wert so much a citizen of the world, that thou couldst pity an overladen French beast of burden, though not a countryman of thine, sit thou before me, too, with that right-hand forefinger of thine poked under thy peruke, and pointing (as Gall will translate it) like an index to the organ of wit; and inspire me with thy merry-muscled mouth, (so like, in expression, to that of the little girl with the mouse, of Sir Joshua,) puckered up with an incipient laugh; and gaze on and illuminate me with those small, intense, joke-darting eyes of thine (so like the eyes of little Muscipula,) while I talk of one whose heart, though bruised by the world, is still not less sensible than thine of pity, of love, of sentiment, of benevolence, of humanity, and of all those many feelings which compose and make up "the noblest work of God," a "glorious human creature." I would have invoked thee, " My FRIEND" for who but thyself can describe thee; but thy modest and diffident soul would not have attended my call; it were easier to "call spirits from the vasty deep," than to pull thee from thy close concealments, and thrust thee before the many-eyed monster the world, to be the gaze and wonder of the million: I have heard thee say, that he who leaps up on the pedestals of Fame, should be prepared to hear of the

holes in his stockings; and thine, I fear me, are not darned since yesterday; therefore I spare thee to-day. Thou hast, I know, (thy young pulse of pride having subsided into a calmer motion,) no wish to be shewn "as our rarer monsters are;" then stand thou behind the arras, and fear not: I am no madcap Hamlet, nor thou an eaves-dropping Polonius; and if thou wert, my wit is not the weapon that should wound thee: it is as pointless as 's epigrams; thou mayest fall on it, and find it no" iron stake;" and if it were, should it wound thee, who wilt not suffer a fly suicidally or accidentally to smother in thy mustard, without letting thy mutton cool to save him, putting off thy appetite till thou hast started him on a fresh venture with well-wiped wings, as trim and gallant as the best of his brother free-traders? Never, "while memory holds a seat in this distracted globe," and Smith a seat in the Commons!

Ye shall know the man I mean, o' Sunday, by his quick restlessness of eye, that "seeks occasion for his wit;" by his erectness, without pride, of person ; by the pleasant jauntiness of his carriage and the pendulum swing of his cane, unconscious of dog or puppy punishments; by the modest regard he pays to beauty, as she "queens it along;" by the tenderness he shews to age and decrepitude as they halt by; by the old-bachelorly pattings of head, hair, and hat, as he picks his way among the little red-morocco-shoed pedestrians of our great city; by the admonitory shakes of the head, and shouldn't-do-so looks, with which he awes master Theophrastus Tomkins from throwing a meditated stone at master Junius Jenkins his head; by his active humanity in snatching the heedless Miss Smith from under the pole of a hackney-coach; or by his careful politeness, in preventing "the crush of" flowers, " and the wreck of" Leghorn, in the bonnet of Miss Jones, averting from it the imminent peril of the "by your leave" of an overloaded city-porter, who is always for making every head he meets with the pitching-block of

a moment.

But ye shall not know him by any of these signs o' Monday: he is then a creature changed,-a man not himself, and yet not another ask the moon why she changes, or the camelion what was his favourite colour yesterday, and why he does not affect it to-day, and ye shall get as conclusive an answer from either as from him he changes, and knows not he doth change; from the "grave to the gay" is but one step; from the gay to the graye is no more: one step, as I have heard him say, transports a man or a lawyer out of the New Inn into St. Clement's Inn: "all things exist but in a ceaseless change;" and change is, I believe, the life of life to him; but it is the outward man only that doth change in him; his heart is ever the same: that is the fixed centre of a restlessly-revolving body; it is eccentric, yet it swerves not to the right nor to the left; the world, and its allies,