84 Notes of the Month on QJuLY, 



the historian of the Anglo-Saxon Dynasties, is another. We may yet 

 go more deeply into the matter. But we may say even here, that 

 George the Third gave pensions of £300. a year to eminent authors, to 

 the full amount of the allowance to the Royal Society of Literature ; 

 that the present pensions were understood by every individual who re- 

 ceived them, to be for life; and that the bounty of George the Fourth, 

 for sustaining and honouring one of the chief sources of glory to his 

 empire, ought not to be superseded by any new spirit of economy. 



We are not now to learn that a man may be puffed into any thing, and 

 that the reputation of half the magtiates of wit, philosophy, and physic 

 among us, has been the work of vigorous puffing. Old Fuseli was one 

 of those wonders. His coterie, a gang of infidels, male and female, who 

 used to dine at a bookseller's, propagated his renown as the wittiest of 

 human creatures. The fry of students in the Drawing School of the 

 Academy instinctively looked up to the drawing-master as something 

 supernatural in sketching ; and the mob of native connoisseurs, who won- 

 der at every thing with a foreign name, pronounced it as a maxim that 

 no one could paint Lucifer as Lucifer ought to be painted, but the man 

 with a Swiss one. Yet this wonderful person was but a shallow fellow 

 in all his provinces of wit and wisdom — with pen or pencil, with broken 

 English, or barbarous Greek : — which fact is thoroughly established by 

 the late publication of his memoirs ; a work containing more naked 

 rudeness, vulgarity, and impudence, under pretext of wit, than is to be 

 found on record of any individual since Jonathan Wild. This is no 

 charge against the biographer ; he has probably done his best with bad 

 materials. But Fuseli" s repartees, remarks, his notions of decorum, and 

 his trifling pedantry, must be allowed to take rank among the dullest 

 attempts at pubhc effect within memory. 



Old Abernethy is another of those fabrications of waggery and wis- 

 dom. The following specimens have been going the round of the 

 papers :— . 



" A loquacious lady having called to consult him, he could not succeed in 

 silencing her, without resorting to the following expedient:— ' Put out your 

 tongue. Madam.' The lady complied.—' Now keep it there till / have done 

 talking.' Another lady brought her daughter to him one day, but he refused 

 to hear her or to prescribe, advising her to make the girl take exercise. When 

 the guinea was put into his hand, he recalled the mother, and said, ' Here, 

 take the shilling back, and buy a skipping-rope for your daughter as you go 

 along.' He kept his pills in a bag, and used to dole them out to his patients ; 

 and on doing so to a lady, who stepped out of a coroneted carriage to consult 

 him, she declared they made her sick, and she could never take a pill. ' Not 

 take a pill ? what a fool you must be !' was the courteous and conciliatory 

 reply to the countess. '.Yhen the late Duke of York consulted him, he stood 

 whistling, with his hands in his pockets; and the duke said, ' I suppose yon 

 know who I am?' The uncourtly reply was, ' Suppose I do— what of that?' 

 His pithy advice was, ' Cut oflf the supplies, as the Duke of Wellington did in 

 his campaign, and the enemy will leave the citadel.' " 



Now, -What is to be thought of the practitioner who could have been 

 capable of this vulgar nonsense, but that he was determined on his own 

 ruin ; or of the man, but that he was prepared to be kicked out of so- 

 ciety. The fact is, that Abernethy was as eager for keeping his position 

 as any jEsculapius of them all ; and in the first place, he never ventured 

 any of those coxcombries with persons of any consideration ; in the next. 



