and collector. The residue on the sale
ensured me a modest independence apart from the
profits of a profession, and as I had not been
legally bound to defray my father's debts, so I
obtained that character for disinterestedness and
integrity which always in England tends to
propitiate the public to the successes achieved by
industry or talent. Perhaps, too, any professional
ability I might possess was the more readily
conceded, because I had cultivated with assiduity
the sciences and the scholarship which are
collaterally connected with the study of medicine.
Thus, in a word, I established a social position
which came in aid of my professional repute, and
silenced much of that envy which usually
embitters and sometimes impedes success.

Dr. Faber retired at the end of the two years
agreed upon. He went abroad; and being,
though advanced in years, of a frame still robust,
and habits of mind still inquiring and eager, he
commenced a lengthened course of foreign travel,
during which our correspondence, at first
frequent, gradually languished, and finally died
away.

I succeeded at once to the larger part of the
practice which the labours of thirty years had
secured to my predecessor. My chief rival was
a Dr. Lloyd, a benevolent, fervid man, not without
genius—if genius be present where judgment
is absent; not without science, if that may be
science which fails in precision. One of those
clever desultory men who, in adopting a profession,
do not give up to it the whole force and
heat of their minds. Men of that kind
habitually accept a mechanical routine, because in
the exercise of their ostensible calling their
imaginative faculties are drawn away to pursuits
more alluring. Therefore, in their proper vocation
they are seldom bold or inventive—out of it
they are sometimes both to excess. And when
they do take up a novelty in their own profession
they cherish it with an obstinate tenacity, and an
extravagant passion, unknown to those quiet
philosophers who take up novelties every day,
examine them with the sobriety of practised
eyes, to lay down altogether, modify in part, or
accept in whole, according as inductive experiment
supports or destroys conjecture.

Dr. Lloyd had been esteemed a learned
naturalist long before he was admitted to be a
tolerable physician. Amidst the privations of
his youth he had contrived to form, and with
each succeeding year he had perseveringly
increased, a zoological collection of creatures, not
alive, but, happily for the beholder, stuffed or
embalmed. From what I have said, it will be
truly inferred that Dr. Lloyd's earlier career as
a physician had not been brilliant; but of late
years he had gradually rather aged, than worked
himself, into that professional authority and
station, which time confers on a thoroughly
respectable man, whom no one is disposed to envy,
and all are disposed to like.

Now in L—— there were two distinct social
circles. That of the wealthy merchants and
traders, and that of a few privileged families
inhabiting a part of the town aloof from the marts
of commerce, and called the Abbey Hill. These
superb Areopagites exercised over the wives and
daughters of the inferior citizens to whom all
of L——, except the Abbey Hill, owed its
prosperity, the same kind of mysterious influence
which the fine ladies of Mayfair and Belgravia
are reported to hold over the female denizens of
Bloomsbury and Marylebone.

Abbey Hill was not opulent; but it was powerful
by a concentration of its resources in all
matters of patronage. Abbey Hill had its own
milliner, and its own draper, its own confectioner,
butcher, baker, and tea-dealer, and the patronage
of Abbey Hill was like the patronage of royalty,
less lucrative in itself than as a solemn certificate
of general merit. The shops on which Abbey
Hill conferred its custom were certainly not the
cheapest, possibly not the best. But they were
undeniably the most imposing. The proprietors
were decorously pompous—the shopmen
superciliously polite. They could not be more so if they
had belonged to the State, and been paid by a public
which they benefited and despised. The ladies
of Low Town (as the city subjacent to the Hill
had been styled from a date remote in the feudal
ages) entered those shops with a certain awe,
and left them with a certain pride. There they
had learned what the Hill approved. There
they had bought what the Hill had purchased. It
is much in this life to be quite sure that we
are in the right, whatever that conviction may
cost us. Abbey Hill had been in the habit of
appointing, amongst other objects of patronage,
its own physician. But that habit had
fallen into disuse during the latter years of
my predecessor's practice. His superiority over
all other medical men in the town had become
so incontestable, that, though he was emphatically
the doctor of Low Town, the head of its
hospitals and infirmaries, and by birth related to
its principal traders, still as Abbey Hill was
occasionally subject to the physical infirmities of
meaner mortals, so on those occasions it deemed
it best not to push the point of honour to the
wanton sacrifice of life. Since Low Town
possessed one of the most famous physicians in
England, Abbey Hill magnanimously resolved
not to crush him by a rival. Abbey Hill let him
feel its pulse.

When my predecessor retired, I had presumptuously
expected that the Hill would have
continued to suspend its normal right to a special
physician, and shown to me the same generous
favour it had shown to him, who had declared
me worthy to succeed to his honours. I had the
more excuse for this presumption because the
Hill had already allowed me to visit a fair
proportion of its invalids, had said some very
gracious things to me about the great respectability
of the Fenwick family, and sent me some invitations
to dinner, and a great many invitations to
tea.

But my self-conceit received a notable check.