70 THK DOCTOR. 



has her altar been ever since surrounded with darkness and mystery. 

 Socrates himself dared not cheat Esculapius, however he laughed 

 at Jupiter. The Asclepiadans grew rich when the priest of Apollo 

 grew poor, and monarchs shrunk before the man who had rent the 

 veil of death itself. The priests, alone, of our own land possessed 

 the charm of the physician ; then the cowled and gloomy monk 

 held the poisoned chalice to the victim's lip ; next the dim, myste- 

 rious Doctor, who, with overwhelming brows, culling of simples in 

 his dingy shop, hung round with alligators stufied, and skins of 

 hideous, ill-shaped fishes, the very dust of years gone by, coating 

 the unbrushed webs of a hundred spiders. There, in his dark gown, 

 night after night, communing with the magic of his art, prying 

 into the vocabulary of heaven for the uncertain horoscope ; while 

 the distilling vapours of simples, but of potent kind — vervain and 

 yew — gathered, in the moon's eclipse, with solemn incantation, 

 wreathed in misty vapours round the walls ; the whitened crucibles, 

 the ever-burning, bubbling furnace, the flickering lamp gently 

 lighting up the magic sanctuary, or falling just askant the worn and 

 pallid features of the Doctor, who next degenerated into the little 

 man in black, with the wide, white peruke. 



But, like every other class, the Doctors have so multiplied that 

 the original character is almost lost ; the faith which of erst hung 

 like a tassel to the gold-headed cane of the last century, has passed 

 away as a tale that is told, and the learned little men in black and 

 bob-wigs have too passed away to be numbered with slashed doub- 

 lets and trunk-hose in the grave of the olden times. Multiplication 

 breeds want — want breeds contempt of dignity ; and thus profes- 

 sional gravity and importance has degenerated into fact, and what 

 once rested in the mystery of faith — success — depends now on inge- 

 nuity. 



The Doctor is now vulgarly omnivorous, and lives in the world 

 like all the rest of the world : and he that a hundred years ago 

 would as soon have thought of any other cloak than black, as that 

 a pleader should forget his gown or a priest his cassock, now touches 

 your pulse with a blue coat and brass buttons, corduroy breeches, 

 and top boots. O tempora ! mores ! 



The Doctor is now a risible animal — he laughs, he jokes, he 

 grows fat. " Look on this picture and on that." Who does not 

 sigh for the little man whose very step was ghastly, whose face as 

 he gazed down upon you with his dead, heavy-looking eyes, and 

 pressing his cane like a divining rod against his chin, might have 



