of _sotto voce_ contrivances, must needs
have a tendency to create a subserviency of spirit and of manner, which
naturally directs itself into gentility-mongering: where realities, such
as medical experience, reading, and skill, are remotely, or not at all,
appreciable, we must take up with appearances; and of all appearances,
the appearance of proximity to people of fashion is the most taking and
seductive to people _not_ of fashion. It is for this reason that a
rising physician, if he happen to have a lord upon his sick or visiting
list, never has done telling his plebeian patients the particulars of
his noble case, which they swallow like almond milk, finding it an
excellent _placebo_.

As it is the interest of a gentility-monger, and his constant practice,
to be attended by a fashionable physician, in order that he may be
enabled continually to talk of what Sir Henry thinks of this, and how
Sir Henry objects to that, and the opinion of Sir Henry upon t'other, so
it is the business of the struggling doctor to be a gentility-monger,
with the better chance of becoming one day or other a fashionable
physician. Acting on this principle, the poor man must necessarily have
a house in a professional neighbourhood, which usually abuts upon a
neighbourhood fashionable or exclusive; he must hire a carriage by the
month, and be for ever stepping in and out of it, at his own door,
keeping it purposely bespattered with mud to show the extent of his
visiting acquaintance; he must give dinners to people "who _may_ be
useful," and be continually on the look-out for those lucky accidents
which have made the fortunes, and, as a matter of course, the _merit_,
of so many professional men.

He becomes a Fellow of the Royal Society, which gives him the chance of
conversing with a lord, and the right of entering a lord's (the
president's) house, which is turned into sandwich-shop four times a-year
for his reception; this, being the nearest approach he makes to
acquaintance with great personages, he values with the importance it
deserves.

His servants, with famine legibly written on their bones, are assiduous
and civil; his wife, though half-starved, is very genteel, and at her
dinner parties burns candle-ends from the palace.[48]

[48] In a wax-chandler's shop in Piccadilly, opposite St.
James's Street, may be seen stumps, or, as the Scotch call
them, _doups_ of wax-lights, with the announcement "Candle-ends
from