uncomfortable certificates, and the bloom of Privy
Council patronage upon him.

And the little old doctor. Ah! there is corn
in Egypt. All is not barren. The diminutive
veteran of medical science still flourishes. I
am myself one of the most prejudiced of mankind,
and I confess that I don't like my doctors when
young, or large. If the former, I ask
querulously what they know about my stomach? They
are not old enough to have a stomach of their own.
If the latter—if they run large, and are muscular
and good-looking—I fancy they are too much
occupied in boating, or cricketing, or spouting,
or riding, or flirting, to devote the proper quota
of time to study and experiment. I have known
many doctors who were expert photographers. In
my captious way, I always contended they would
have been much better employed in dissecting
frogs. We want a doctor to know all about the
inside of things, not their exterior. May he not
take a turn at his camera during his leisure
time, it may be asked? A doctor has no right to
any leisure. When fatigued with study, let him
seek out a brother medico and amicably converse
upon the arrangement of nuclei, or the different
processes of the central lamella of the ethmoid
bone. Let him descant on frigorific mixtures
or compound mercurial liniments. Had John
Hunter any leisure? Had Astley Cooper, had
Abernethy, had Bichât, had Esquirol? Look
at that wonderful Monsieur Majendie, who, in
his odd moments, vivisected cats, dogs, and
rabbits—pour se distraire!

Again, large doctors make a noise in the sick-
room, handle you roughly, and talk loud. Give
me a little old man for a physician. I don't
care if he be old enough to have killed my
grandmother. I say, when I am sick, "This
withered bright-eyed little old Sage has brought
hundreds of children into the world, has seen
hundreds of strong men die, has saved hundreds
of others who were in worse case than I. Let
him work his will with me. He is not a fool.
He must have seen much, learnt much, and
must know more." In matters of surgery I
admit that I don't stand out for age and size.
When amputation be unavoidable, the Colossus
of Rhodes may as well cut off your leg as a
pigmy.

So great a change has come—emphatically
over the face—of English society since the
momentous question "Why shave?" was mooted
some twelve years since in Household Words,
that very nearly all the ancient landmarks and
types of outward character are as lost as the
books of Livy. When I state that the porter
of the Strand Union Workhouse in London
wears a luxuriant beard, that pawnbrokers,
railway guards, and linendrapers' assistants
have burst out in moustaches, and that my
bootmaker called upon me the other morning
with a "goatee," the extent to which abundant
hairiness has changed the aspect of polite
society will be readily understood. Orson is
everywhere, Valentine nowhere. Love levels
ranks; but beards give to modern English
humanity as uniform a facial cast as may
be seen in that famous regiment of the
Russian guards twelve hundred strong, all the
privates of which have snub noses, and the
field-officers alone are permitted to be nasally
Roman. The little old gentlemen one meets in
easy life, have, as a rule, abandoned themselves
to the beard mania, and to me are little old
gentlemen no more. When I see grizzled beards '
wagging beneath their little noses and
spectacles, my thoughts revert with anything but
favourable impressions to the gardens of the
Zoological Gardens, and the inmates of certain
cages I have seen there. Upon my word, I saw
a little old Reverend, Fellow of his College,
too, with a beard, but three weeks since. No
wonder that Essays and Reviews run through
so many editions, and that heterodoxy is rife in
the land!

By little old men I do not mean dwarfs.
There is the usual number of those afflicted
persons to be seen about; and an elderly dwarf
is the usual merry sprightly musical little fellow,
or else the (nearly as usual) spiteful malevolent
snapping and snarling little nuisance. No, no;
the little old men I seek and so rarely find,
are the dapper symmetrical clean-limbed
personages who, for grinning and bowing, for
smirking and simpering, for fetching ladies'
cloaks and putting on their own goloshes,
for slapping giants on the back even if they
stand on tiptoe to do it, for poking people
in the ribs, and seeing the hardest drinkers out
at a carouse, were inimitable and unequalled.
They were almost always valiant little men, too,
choleric, peppery, tremendous fire-eaters, often
lugging about huge cases of duelling-pistols.
How they snapped off the noses of tavern waiters!
How they put their arms a-kimbo and beat
hackney-coachmen off their own ground, by slanging
them down! In argument it was difficult
to find a match for the little old men. It was no
use taunting them with "the infirmities of age,"
or calling them dotards and fogies. They
weren't infirm; they didn't dote; they hadn't
a touch of fogeyism about them. But where
does one find the active, jaunty, sarcastic
little old man now-a-days? Large limp purse-
mouthed old men fill the bow-windows of clubs,
wheezing forth platitudes to other old men. Sad
old boys maunder in drawing-rooms or grumble
at dinner-tables. Dreary old peers, six feet
bent double, rise from the back benches of their
Lordships' House, and deny the fact of the sun
having risen that morning. It would be
libellous, perhaps, to hint that—well, our
vestries—are governed by knots of doddering old
men; but it is undeniable, I think, that many
really clever little old men were formerly to be
found in the Commons' House of Parliament.
Those that now remain are few, and are growing
a feeble folk.

Little old men seemed to have acquired their
vivacity, as old port wine its crust and flavour,
by long keeping and careful cellarage. There is,
as a rule, nothing more remarkable in a little
young man than his conceit. As for little
middle-aged men, they frequently keep their