makes many hold on like barnacles, under the
absurd notion that they are useful to the ship—
that they preserve the copper! Government
officials are very prone to think this; and they
sigh to themselves over the thought of a time
when some blundering successor will mislay that
seal, or not remember where be has laid that
document. It is a thought of this kind that
poetises life to scores of grey-headed, crape-
hatted, black frock-coated men, who cross the
parks about eleven o'clock of a morning,
umbrella in hand, with a half-saddened look
compounded of general dreariness and dyspepsia.
They are sustained, however, by the consciousness
of an obvious destiny. They know their
value to "the office!"

It is better on the whole—better for
themselves, and better for the world— that these
men should not " leave off." They are in their
very essence a sort of moral fly-wheel that
regulates motion, and gives rhythm to labour; and
the world could spare a great many of its
brilliant elements with less loss than its "chief
clerks."

If it is hard to give up; it is ten times harder
to know what to do when one has given up!
When a friend once complimented Sir Astley
Cooper, in his retirement, on the magnificence
of an oak-tree in his lawn, "Yes," said the
happy possessor, " I have often thought of
hanging myself to one of its branches!" He
who gives up with the notion of adopting some
new groove in life, must be endowed with
remarkable energy and persistence. Painters
well understand what is meant by an artist's
second manner; and there is a second manner in
ethics as well as in art, and with this
resemblance—that it is rarely a success. The world,
too, identifies a man with what he has done
once, if comparatively well, and will not easily
tolerate him in a new part. I do not know
it as a fact, but I should greatly doubt, for
instance, if Sheridan Knowles was ever as
popular as a preacher as he was as a
playwright.

This new direction to a man's faculties is, in
reality, a practical rebuke to his critics, as though
saying— " Here is a rich mine in me you never
discovered. You praise me for this, and
disparage me for that; but you never suspected
that underneath what you approved and
condemned was a stratum totally distinct from
each." It would be a great step in our
knowledge of mankind if we could apply to humanity
the tests by which we are guided in the material
world, and where the existence of one element
is accepted as proof of the presence of another
in its immediate neighbourhood. When you
find quartz, you'll find gold, is a fact known to
every digger; but is there a human quartz? Is
there no inert, almost valueless property that is
the certain indication of something great,
brilliant, and sterling?

What relation has graywhacke to lignite?
and yet, where you discover one you are sure of
the other; and why do we not attempt similar
explorations into human temperament, and be
able to say, " I saw from that man's moroseness
he would be an admirable clockmaker;" or,
when he laughed, "I observed there is the
making of a great ship-builder?"

Could we attain to this, " giving up" would
be bereft of more than half its difficulty, and
instead of the adventurer on a new career
going out upon the wide ocean of life guideless
and chartless, he would be steering by a star
that never paled, and to a haven whose
headlands towered bold and blue in the distance.

ILLIBERAL DOCTORS.

WITH the highest respect and regard for the
medical profession, and a wholesome sense of the
fact that knowledge comes of study, whereby we
are saved from false dependence upon quacks, we
yet differ strongly in one respect from the Royal
College of Surgeons in Ireland. We hold the
practice of medicine and surgery to be the
practice of a liberal profession, and that college
apparently does not. We hold the medical
profession to be a republic of busy, practical,
inquiring men, who, when they have given guarantees
of a due preparation for the serious
responsibility they undertake, in meddling with the
lives and health of their fellow-citizens, must be
left each man to the teaching of his own
experience, and the working out of his own reasoning.
There will be, and there must be, even upon
vital points of treatment, wide differences of
opinion—for example, even at this day, one
doctor will bleed a patient to whom another will
give half a pint of brandy. There will be wide
differences of intellectual power, leading many to
weak and erroneous reasoning upon the facts
they observe; it may happen, also, in this as in
every profession, that the emptiest man will
appear most self-sufficient and self-confident.
Incompetence elbowing its way roughly forward
will sometimes make itself more profitably
conspicuous than quick sense and competency. All
this is but the way of the world. The incompetent
man is usually known of his brethren, and
in the sense of that fact has his humiliation, let
him impose as he may upon the public.

But if the ignorant practitioner be left to his
devices, by what sense of equal rights to free
inquiry is even a highly-educated physician to
have a ban set on him by his brethren because,
in the course of his free exercise of judgment, he
has arrived at opinions which are not held by the
greater number of his brethren: opinions which
he does not dishonestly conceal, and by which, and
by the issues and consequences of which in his
practice, he honestly agrees to stand or fall? Some
time ago the Royal College of Surgeons in
Ireland ordained as follows: "that no Fellow or
Licentiate of the Royal College shall pretend or
profess to cure diseases by the deception called
Homœopathy, or the practice called Mesmerism,
or by any other form of quackery. It is also
hereby ordained that no Fellow or Licentiate of