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there he would do his duty, and do it well. Nor could he be 

 imagined in a false position. A gentleman, according to his own 

 definition of that word, " he did to others that which he would desire 

 to be done to him, respecting them as he respected himself." Simple 

 in his manners, he gained confidence at once ; accustomed to mix 

 with the poorest in the hospital and with the noblest in their private 

 abodes, he sympathized with the better qualities of each valued all, 

 and despised nothing but moral meanness. Though as a boy he was 

 retiring and modest, he was happy in the company of older persons, 

 and, as he grew older, loved in his turn to help the young. " I hear 

 you are ill," he wrote once in the zenith of his life to a hospital 

 student of whom he did not then know much ; " no one will take 

 better care of you than I ; come to my country house till you are 

 well ; " and the student stayed there two months. He was thought 

 by some reserved he was modest ; by others hasty he valued 

 time, and could not give to trifles that which belonged to real suffer- 

 ing ; he was sometimes thought impatient, when his quick glance had 

 already told him more than the patient could either describe or under- 

 stand. Unconscious of self, of strong common sense, confident of his 

 ground or not entering thereon, seeing in every direction, modest, 

 just, sympathetic, he lived for one great end the lessening of disease. 

 For this object no labour was too great, no patience too long, no 

 science too difficult. He felt indeed (to use his own words on the 

 day of his election as President) " his happiness to be in a life of 

 Exertion" As a professional man he valued science because it so 

 often points the way to that which is practically useful to man ; but 

 as a scientific man his one object was the Truth, which he pursued 

 for its own sake wholly irrespective of any other reward which might 

 or might not follow on discovery. He had not the common faults of 

 common men, for he had not their objects, nor their instinct for ease, 

 nor their prejudices : though he became rich, he had not unduly 

 sought riches ; though he was greatly distinguished, he had not 

 desired fame ; he was beloved, not having courted popularity. "What 

 he was himself, that he allowed other men to be, till he found them 

 otherwise. He saw weak points in his profession, but he saw them 

 as the debris from the mountains of knowledge and of wisdom, of 

 benevolence and of self-denial, of old traditional skill ever growing 

 and always purifying, those eternal structures on which are founded 



