rican or even Continental
graduates in medicine, than the privilege of adding to their names the
letters "F.R.C.P.(Eng.)," Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of
England. The College worked the reformation of medical practice in
England, and its methods have proved the suggestive formulae for many
another such institution and for laws that all over the world protect,
to some extent at least, the public from quacks and charlatans.

Linacre's change of profession at the end of his life has been a
fruitful source of conjecture and misconception on the part of his
biographers. Few of them seem to be able to appreciate the fact,
common enough in the history of the Church, that a man may, even when
well on in years, give up everything to which his life has been so far
directed, and from a sense of duty devote himself entirely to the
attainment of "the one thing necessary." Linacre appears only to have
done what many another in the history of {82} the thirteenth,
fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries did without any comment; but his
English biographers insist on seeing ulterior motives in it, or else
fail entirely to understand it. The same action is not so rare even in
our own day that it should be the source of misconception by later
writers.

Dr. S. Weir Mitchell has, in the early part of _Dr. North and His
Friends_, a very curious passage with regard to Linacre. One of the
characters, St. Clair, says: "I saw, the other day, at Owen's, a life
of one Linacre, a doctor, who had the luck to live about 1460 to 1524,
when men knew little and thought they knew all. In his old age he took
for novelty to reading St. Matthew. The fifth, sixth, and seventh
chapters were enough. He threw the book aside and cried out, 'Either
this is not the Gospel, or we are not Christians.' What else could he
say?" St. Clair uses the story to enforce an idea of his own, which he
states as a question, as follows: "And have none of you the courage to
wrestle with the thought I gave you, that Christ could not have
expected the mass of men to live the life He pointed out as desirable
for the first disciples of His faith?"

Dr. Mitchell's anecdote is not accepted by Linacre's biographers
generally, though it is copied by Dr. Payne, the writer of the article
on Linacre in the (English) _Dictionary of National Biography_, who,
however, discredits it somewhat. The story is founded on Sir John
Cheke's {83} account of the conversion of Linacre. It is ve