us by its long continuance? Alas, Mr. Bull,
I do find it is all little other than a proof of toughness, which is a
quality I respect, with more or less expenditure of falsity and
astucity superadded, which I entirely condemn. Toughness _plus_
astucity:--perhaps a simple wooden mast set up in Palace-Yard, well
soaped and duly presided over, might be the honester method? Such a
method as this by trial of talk, for filling your chief offices in
Church and State, was perhaps never heard of in the solar system
before. You are quite used to it, my poor friend; and nearly dead by the
consequences of it: but in the other Planets, as in other epochs of your
own Planet it would have done had you proposed it, the thing awakens
incredulous amazement, world-wide Olympic laughter, which ends in
tempestuous hootings, in tears and horror! My friend, if you can, as
heretofore this good while, find nobody to take care of your affairs
but the expertest talker, it is all over with your affairs and you. Talk
never yet could guide any man's or nation's affairs; nor will it yours,
except towards the _Limbus Patrum_, where all talk, except a very select
kind of it, lodges at last.

Medicine, guarded too by preliminary impediments, and frightful
medusa-heads of quackery, which deter many generous souls from entering,
is of the _half_-articulate professions, and does not much invite the
ardent kinds of ambition. The intellect required for medicine might be
wholly human, and indeed should by all rules be,--the profession of the
Human Healer being radically a sacred one and connected with the
highest priesthoods, or rather being itself the outcome and acme of all
priesthoods, and divinest conquests of intellect here below. As will
appear one day, when men take off their old monastic and ecclesiastic
spectacles, and look with eyes again! In essence the Physician's task
is always heroic, eminently human: but in practice most unluckily at
present we find it too become in good part _beaverish_; yielding a
money-result alone. And what of it is not beaverish,--does not that too
go mainly to ingenious talking, publishing of yourself, ingratiating
of yourself; a partly human exercise or waste of intellect, and alas a
partly vulpine ditto;--making the once sacred [Gr.] _'Iatros_, or Human
Healer, more impossible for us than ever!

Angry basilisks watch at the gates of Law and Church just now; and
strike a sad damp into the nobler of the young aspirants.