PREFACE. IX 



question that these discourses were brilliant, eloquent, and 

 most interesting to listen to ; hut the end of that man is 

 not yet come,"" 



This may be merely bad taste, senile weak- 

 ness, blatant imbecility; but it is nevertheless 

 very unkind to try and frighten a man, especially 

 when a doctor is the ogre. I know not who the 

 *' certain exalted personage " happens to be, but 

 the mawkish sentiraentalism, the twaddle of thia 

 insidious prophet, must meet with its merited con- 

 tempt from the exalted personage, since he can 

 point to the late Duke of Sussex, who was an 

 inveterate smoker to the last, and died comfort- 

 ably in a good old age. And with regard to the 

 still more Spurgeonite " turn or burn " warning 

 given to the clergyman, the latter may think of 

 the celebrated Dr. Parr — not the doctor of the 

 life-pills — but the liberal-minded clergyman who 

 died in 1825, beyond the scriptural age, namely, 

 in his seventy-eighth year, of whom his medical 

 friend and biographer says, that he "had fallen 

 ripe and in due season ;" and this friend, Dr. 

 John Johnston, F.R.S , and Fellow of the 

 Royal College of Physicians of London, re- 



