CHAPTER CXIX.
THE DOCTOR IN HIS CURE. IRRELIGION THE REPROACH OF HIS PROFESSION.
Virtue, and that part of philosophy
Will I apply, that treats of happiness
By virtue specially to be achieved.
TAMING OF THE SHREW.
A practitioner of medicine possesses in what may be called his cure, that knowledge of all who are under his care, which the parochial priest used to possess in former times, and will it is to be hoped regain whenever the most beneficial of all alterations shall be effected in the Church Establishment, and no Clergyman shall have a duty imposed upon him which it is impossible to fulfil,—impossible it is, if his parishioners are numbered by thousands instead of hundreds. In such cases one of two consequences must inevitably ensue. Either he will confine himself to the formalities of his office, and because he cannot by any exertions do what ought to be done, rest contented with performing the perfunctory routine; or he will exert himself to the utmost till his health, and perhaps his heart also, is broken in a service which is too often found as thankless as it is hopeless.
Our Doctor was, among the poorer families in his cure, very much what Herbert's Country Parson is imagined to be in his parish. There was little pauperism there at that time; indeed none that existed in a degree reproachful to humanity; or in that obtrusive and clamorous form which at present in so many parts of this misgoverned country insults and outrages and endangers society. The labourers were not so ill paid as to be justly discontented with their lot; and he was not in a manufacturing district. His profession led him among all classes; and his temper as well as his education qualified him to sympathize with all, and accommodate himself to each as far as such accommodation was becoming. Yet he was every where the same man; he spoke the King's English in one circle, and the King's Yorkshire in another; but this was the only difference in his conversation with high and low. Before the professors of his art indeed, in the exercise of their calling, the distinctions of society disappear, and poor human nature is stript to its humanities. Rank, and power, and riches,—these—
cannot take a passion away, Sir,
Nor cut a fit but one poor hour shorter.1
The most successful stock jobber, or manufacturer that ever counted his wealth by hundreds of thousands—