"Talking about doctors," replied the Parson, who thought it no scorn when his old schoolmate revived the nickname of early days (conferred perhaps by some young observer, in recognition of his springy step)—"talking about doctors, I think it very likely that my old friend Gowler—you have heard me speak of him—will pay me a little visit, perhaps next week."
"Gowler? Was he at Peter's, after my time? It scarcely sounds like a West country name. No, I remember now. It was at Oxford you fell in with him."
"Yes. He got his Fellowship two years after I got mine. The cleverest man in the College, and one of the best scholars I ever met with. I was nowhere with him, though I read so much harder."
"Come now, Jumps—don't tell me that!" Sir Thomas exclaimed, looking down with admiration at the laureate of his boyhood; "why, you knew everything as pat as butter, when you were no more than a hop o' my thumb! I remember arguing with Gus Browne, that it must be because you were small enough to jump into the skulls of those old codgers, Homer, and Horace, and the rest of them. But how you must have grown since then, my friend! I suppose they gave you more to eat at Oxford. But I don't believe in any man alive being a finer scholar than you are."
"Gowler was, I tell you, Tom; and many, many others; as I soon discovered in the larger world. He had a much keener and deeper mind, far more enquiring and penetrating, more subtle and logical, and comprehensive, together with a smaller share perhaps of—of——"
"Humility—that's the word you mean; although you don't like to say it."
"No, that is not what I mean exactly. What I mean is docility, ductility, sequacity—if there is any such word. The acceptance of what has been discovered, or at any rate acknowledged, by the highest human intellect. Gowler would be content with nothing, because it had satisfied the highest human intellect. It must satisfy his own, or be rejected."
"I am very sorry for him," said Sir Thomas Waldron; "such a man must be drummed out of any useful regiment."
"Well, and he was drummed out of Oxford; or at any rate would follow no drum there. He threw up his Fellowship, rather than take orders, and for some years we heard nothing of him. But he was making his way in London, and winning reputation in minute anatomy. He became the first authority in what is called histology, a comparatively new branch of medical science——"
"Don't Phil, I beg of you. You make me creep. I think of Burke, and Hare, and all those wretches. Fellows who disturb a man's last rest! I have a deep respect for an honest wholesome surgeon; and wonderful things I have seen them do. But the best of them are gone. It was the war that made them; and, thank God, we have no occasion for such carvers now."