llous delineation of Lydgate in "Middlemarch." He is all
over the physician, his manner, his sentiments, his modes of thought,
but he stands alone in fiction. How did that great mistress of her art
learn all of physicians which enabled her to leave us this amazingly
truthful picture? Her life gives us no clue, and when I asked her
husband, George Lewes, to explain the matter, he said that he did not
know, and that she knew no more of this than of how she had acquired her
strangely complete knowledge of the low turf people she has drawn in the
same book, and with an almost equal skill and truth to nature.

It were easy, I fancy, to point out how the doctor's life and training
differ from those of all the other professions, and how this must act on
peculiar individualities for the deepening of some lines and the erasure
of others; but this were too elaborate a study for my present gossiping
essay, and may await another day and a less lazy mood.

If any one should be curious to see what are the modifying circumstances
in a physician's life which strongly tend to weaken or to reinforce
character, I recommend a delightful little address, quite too brief, by
Dr. Emerson, the son of the great essayist. It is unluckily out of print
and difficult to obtain. If you would see in real lives what sturdy
forms of personal distinctness the doctor may assume, there is no better
way than to glance over some half-dozen medical biographies. Read, for
instance, delightful John Brown's sketch of Sydenham and of his own
father, or George Wilson's life of John Reid, the physiologist, whom
community of suffering must have made dear to that gentle intelligence,
and whose days ended in tragic horror such as sensational fiction may
scarcely match; or, for an individuality as well defined and more
pleasing, read Pichot's life of Sir Charles Bell, or one of the most
remarkable of biographies, Mr. Morley's life of Jerome Cardan.

I am reminded as I write how rare are the really good medical
biographies. The autobiographies are better. Ambrose Pare's sketches of
his own life, which was both eventful and varied, are scattered through
his treatise on surgery, and he does not gain added interest in the
hands of Malgaigne. Our own Sims's book about himself is worth reading,
but is too realistic for the library table, yet what a strangely
valuable story it is of the struggle of genius up to eminent success.
But these are the heroes of a not unheroic prof