third and fourth generations, inclining the lads of this house to the
sea, and of that to the bar, according as the great man of the family
achieved his honors on shipboard, or climbed his way to the woolsack.
The Arbuthnots offered no exception to this very natural law of
selection. They could not help remembering how the famous doctor had
excelled in literature as in medicine; how he had been not only
Physician in Ordinary to Queen Anne and Prince George of Denmark, but a
satirist and pamphleteer, a wit and the friend of wits--of such wits as
Pope and Swift, Harley and Bolingbroke. Hence they took, as it were
instinctively, to physic and the _belles lettres_, and were never
without a doctor or an author in the family.

My father, however, like the great Martinus Scriblerus, was both doctor
and author. And he was a John Arbuthnot. And to carry the resemblance
still further, he was gifted with a vein of rough epigrammatic humor, in
which it pleased his independence to indulge without much respect of
persons, times, or places. His tongue, indeed, cost him some friends and
gained him some enemies; but I am not sure that it diminished his
popularity as a physician. People compared him to Abernethy, whereby he
was secretly flattered. Some even went so far as to argue that only a
very clever man could afford to be a bear; and I must say that he pushed
this conclusion to its farthest limit, showing his temper alike to rich
and poor upon no provocation whatever. He cared little, to be sure, for
his connection. He loved the profession theoretically, and from a
scientific point of view; but he disliked the drudgery of country
practice, and stood in no need of its hardly-earned profits. Yet he was
a man who so loved to indulge his humor, no matter at what cost, that I
doubt whether he would have been more courteous had his bread depended
on it. As it was, he practised and grumbled, snarled at his patients,
quarrelled with the rich, bestowed his time and money liberally upon the
poor, and amused his leisure by writing for a variety of scientific
periodicals, both English and foreign.

Our home stood at the corner of a lane towards the eastern extremity of
the town, commanding a view of the Squire's Park, and a glimpse of the
mill-pool and meadows in the valley beyond. This lane led up to
Barnard's Green, a breezy space of high, uneven ground dedicated to
fairs, cricket matches, and travelling circuses, whence the noisy music
of