316 Trade and Profession. [A i- H \ L, 



ever esquire. Distinctions thus arbitrary, it may be concluded, have been 

 difficultly and imperfectly maintained. Every tradesman strives hard to 

 establish his claims to gentility, and endeavours to raise himself to an 

 equality with his professional neighbours, whenever he escapes from the 

 counter. There are two descriptions of persons, more especially, which 

 hang, like Mahomet's coffin, between the two classes, the apothecary and 

 the attorney (I beg his pardon the solicitor), and whose claims to pro- 

 fessional rank have been urged with a pertinacity that has ensured partial 

 success. Of these, the attorney, however, has the advantage, inasmuch as 

 his ware-room is called an office, and not a shop. To avoid the disagree- 

 able sorites, which follows from this term, shop, the apothecary, now-a- 

 days, christens his repository of poisons and pump-water (aqua pumpaginis] 

 by the heathen name of a medical hall. But it wont do ; any one who 

 goes in for a pennyworth of liquorice feels the truth of the matter. An 



apothecary is a tradesman by : and, maugre his customary suit of 



sables and his demi-fortune maugre the superiority lie maintains over 

 the physician by his domestic influence over patient, nurse, and lady's- 

 maid a triumvirate (if that be not a blunder) which .^Esculapius himself 

 dare not resist he is not so good a gentleman as the attorney, who has a 

 legal possession of that honorific distinction. These connecting links, 

 which stand between the two classes, as a mushroom stands between the 

 vegetable arid the animal kingdom, serve, like it, to prove that natural 

 things will not submit to the artificial distinctions of our scientific methods; 

 and they shew that the dispute is altogether de lana capruia. If a trades- 

 man is not a gentleman, the gentleman if he means to cut a slice off the 

 professional loaf, and live by his wits must, in action and spirit, be a 

 tradesman. Notwithstanding his lofty pretensions to gentility, the pro- 

 fessional man, who knows only his profession, is as unfit for his business as 

 a cobler who can only sing psalms; whereas, if he understand his trade, 

 it is no great matter whether he knows his profession or not. Take, for 

 example, the clergy ; to whom I give not any invidious pre-eminence, but 

 put forward simply because their practice is the most genteel of the three 

 learned professions. The clergy are, indeed, a sort of bastard landed- 

 proprietors; and every fool knows that " to have and to hold" a few dirty 

 acres, is more noble, elevated, and dignified, than to have discovered the 

 longitude. Take, I say, the clergy, and see what a man can do among 

 them, who knows only divinity, and who practises no other arts than 

 those of consoling the afflicted, and recovering the lost sheep. A country 

 curacy of seventy pounds a-ycar is his delicicz votontm, his millennium. 

 But put him up to the trick of the trade launch him as a complaisant 

 tutor to a great man, as a supple chaplain, as a blustering magistrate, an 

 intriguing electioneer, or as the jackal to a Bible society, and his fortune is 

 made, though he should scarcely know the Book of Ecclesiastes from the 

 Song of Solomon. Preaching, it may be said, is strictly professional ; and 

 to be a good preacher is no more than an integral part of the character of a 

 good parson. But preaching a sound moral or doctrinal sermon, and 

 preaching at a bishoprick, are two very different things : and so too are 

 printing a professional work, and printing polemical politics, or political 

 polemics, levelled at the prejudices of my Lord High Chancellor, the great 

 giver of clerical good things. Few persons in holy orders can afford to be 

 merely professional; and even those lucky persons who hold livings as a 

 family estate, and who, in allusion to the short-robed jositits of France, 



