AN AGED PUPIL.
Dr. Richard Mead died aged eighty-one. The sale of his library, pictures, and statues brought the heirs eighty thousand dollars. His other effects amounted to one hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars.
Another Dr. Mead, uncle to the above, lived to the age of one hundred and forty-nine years. Both of these physicians were remarkable for their kindness and liberality. The latter left five pounds a year to the poor, to continue forever.
Beauty not Potent with Ladies.
A handsome person is not alone requisite to win the affections of a sensible lady. Radcliffe, who was as great a humbug in affairs matrimonial as in all other matters, was represented as being “handsome and imposing in person;” but his overbearing manner, and his coarse flings at the softer sex, made him anything but a favorite with the ladies. While he professed to be a misogynist, he made several unsuccessful attempts, particularly late in life, to commit himself to matrimony.
A lady, with “a singing noise in her head,” asked what she should do for it. “Curl your hair at night with a ballad,” was the coarse reply.
Once, when sitting over a bottle of wine at a public house, Queen Anne sent her servant for Dr. Radcliffe to hasten to her Royal Highness, who was taken suddenly ill with what was vulgarly called “the blue devils,” to which gormandizers are subject, but more properly termed indigestion. “When the wine is in, the wits are out,” was readily demonstrated in this case; for, on a second messenger arriving from the queen for her physician to make all haste, Radcliffe banged his fist down on the board, at which other physicians also sat, and exclaimed,—
“Go tell her Royal Highness that she has nothing but the vapors.”
When, on the following morning, the process being reversed,—the “wine was out, and wits were in”—the doctor presented himself, with pomp and a show of dignity, at St. James’, judge of his mortification, when the chamberlain stopped him in the anteroom, and informed him that he was already succeeded by Dr. Gibbons.