th Dr Thorne. If his services
could be made available under any other circumstances, he would go to
Greshamsbury as fast as post-horses could carry him.

Then, indeed, there was war in Barsetshire. If there was on Dr
Thorne's cranium one bump more developed than another, it was that of
combativeness. Not that the doctor was a bully, or even pugnacious,
in the usual sense of the word; he had no disposition to provoke a
fight, no propense love of quarrelling; but there was that in him
which would allow him to yield to no attack. Neither in argument nor
in contest would he ever allow himself to be wrong; never at least to
any one but to himself; and on behalf of his special hobbies, he was
ready to meet the world at large.

It will therefore be understood, that when such a gauntlet was thus
thrown in his very teeth by Dr Fillgrave, he was not slow to take it
up. He addressed a letter to the Barsetshire Conservative _Standard_,
in which he attacked Dr Fillgrave with some considerable acerbity.
Dr Fillgrave responded in four lines, saying that on mature
consideration he had made up his mind not to notice any remarks
that might be made on him by Dr Thorne in the public press. The
Greshamsbury doctor then wrote another letter, more witty and much
more severe than the last; and as this was copied into the Bristol,
Exeter, and Gloucester papers, Dr Fillgrave found it very difficult
to maintain the magnanimity of his reticence. It is sometimes
becoming enough for a man to wrap himself in the dignified toga of
silence, and proclaim himself indifferent to public attacks; but it
is a sort of dignity which it is very difficult to maintain. As well
might a man, when stung to madness by wasps, endeavour to sit in his
chair without moving a muscle, as endure with patience and without
reply the courtesies of a newspaper opponent. Dr Thorne wrote a third
letter, which was too much for medical flesh and blood to bear. Dr
Fillgrave answered it, not, indeed, in his own name, but in that of
a brother doctor; and then the war raged merrily. It is hardly too
much to say that Dr Fillgrave never knew another happy hour. Had he
dreamed of what materials was made that young compounder of doses at
Greshamsbury he would have met him in consultation, morning, noon,
and night, without objection; but having begun the war, he was
constrained to go on with it: his brethren would allow him no
alternative. Thus he was continually being brought up to the f