HOW TO BE KEPT IN HEALTH.
Sir G. Staunton related a curious anecdote of old Kien Long, Emperor of China. He was inquiring of Sir George the manner in which physicians were paid in England. When, after some difficulty, his Majesty was made to comprehend the system, he exclaimed, "Is any man well in England, that can afford to be ill? Now, I will inform you," said he, "how I manage my physicians. I have four, to whom the care of my health is committed: a certain weekly salary is allowed them, but the moment I am ill, the salary stops till I am well again. I need not inform you that my illnesses are usually short."
JOHN HUNTER ROUTING THE ROUT.
Mr. Jeaffreson, in his amusing Book about Doctors, tells a good story about the great anatomist, John Hunter. "His wife, though devoted in her attachment to him, and in every respect a lady worthy of esteem, caused her husband at times no little vexation by her fondness for society. She was in the habit of giving enormous routs, at which authors and artists, of all shades of merit and demerit, used to assemble to render homage to her literary powers, which were very far from commonplace. Hunter had no sympathy with his wife's poetical aspirations, still less with the society which those aspirations led her to cultivate. Grudging the time which the labours of practice prevented him from devoting to the pursuits of his museum and laboratory, he could not restrain his too irritable temper when Mrs. Hunter's frivolous amusements deprived him of the quiet requisite for study.... Imagine the wrath of such a man, finding, on his return from a long day's work, his house full of musical professors, connoisseurs, and fashionable idlers—in fact, all the confusion and hubbub and heat of a grand party, which his lady had forgotten to inform him was that evening to come off! Walking straight into the middle of the principal reception-room, he faced round and surveyed his unwelcome guests, who were not a little surprised to see him—dusty, toil-worn, and grim—so unlike what 'the man of the house' ought to be on such an occasion. 'I knew nothing,' was his brief address to the astounded crowd—'I knew nothing of this kick-up, and I ought to have been informed of it beforehand; but, as I have now returned home to study, I hope the present company will retire.' Mrs. Hunter's drawing-rooms were speedily empty."
ANTICS OF THE FANATICS.
In concord, yet in contrast, with Dr. South's censure on the fanatics of the Commonwealth, noticed on a former page, we take this from the Loyal Satirist, or Hudibras in Prose, published among Somers' Tracts:—"Well, who's for Aldermanbury? You would think a phœnix preached there; but the birds will flock after an owl as fast; and a foot-ball in cold weather is as much followed as Calama (Calamy) by all his rampant dog-day zealots. But 'tis worth the crouding to hear the baboon expound like the ape taught to play on the cittern. You would think the church, as well as religion, were inversed, and the anticks which were used to be without were removed into the pulpit. Yet these apish tricks must be the motions of the spirit, his whimsie-meagrim must be an ecstatie, and Dr. G——, his palsy make him the father of the sanctified shakers. Thus, among Turks, dizziness is a divine trance, changlings and idiots are the chiefest saints, and 'tis the greatest sign of revelation to be out of one's wits.
"Instead of a dumb-shew, enter the sermon dawbers. O what a gracious sight is a silver inkhorn! How blessed a gift is it to write shorthand! What necessary implements for a saint are cotton wool and blotting-paper! These dablers turn the church into a scrivener's shop. A country fellow last term mistook it for the Six Clerks' Office. The parson looks like an offender upon the scaffold, and they penning his confession; or a spirit conjured up by their uncouth characters. By his cloak you would take him for the prologue to a play; but his sermon, by the length of it, should be a taylor's bill; and what treats it of but such buckram, fustian stuff? What a desperate green-sickness is the land fallen into, thus to doat on coals and dirt, and such rubbish divinity! Must the French cook our sermons too! and are frogs, fungos, and toadstools the chiefest dish in a spiritual collation? Strange Israelites! that cannot distinguish betwixt mildew and manna. Certainly in the brightest sunshine of the gospel clouds are the best guides; and woodcocks are the only birds of paradise. I wonder how the ignorant rabbies should differ so much, since most of their libraries consist only of a concordance. The wise men's star doubtless was an ignis fatuus in a churchyard; and it was some such Will-o'-th'-Whisp steered prophetical Saltmarsh, when, riding post to heaven, he lost his way in so much of revelation as not to be understood; like the musick of the spheres, which never was heard."
POPE'S LAST EPIGRAM.
During Pope's last illness, it is said, a squabble happened in his chamber between his two physicians, Dr. Burton and Dr. Thomson, who mutually charged each other with hastening the death of the patient by improper treatment. Pope at length silenced them by saying, "Gentlemen, I only learn by your discourse that I am in a dangerous way; therefore, all I now ask is, that the following epigram may be added after my death to the next edition of the Dunciad, by way of postscript:—
'Dunces rejoice, forgive all censures past,
The greatest dunce has kill'd your foe at last.'"