subjects from ancient verse and history." How
beautiful those designs were, is well known to
all who have seen the exquisite collections of
Wedgwood-ware lent for exhibition at South
Kensington by Sir T. W. Holburne, Sir John
Hippesley, and others. A very lovely specimen,
representing a group of infant Bacchanals, and
executed in Flaxman's best manner, is also
engraved in Labarte's valuable Handbook of the
Arts.

It is pleasant to know, on Cunningham's
authority, that the great sculptor loved to allude
in after years to these humbler labours of his
youth.

Josiah Wedgwood, while thus acquiring
fortune and reputation for himself, and lending a
helping hand to many artists, native and foreign,
was also serving the commercial interests of his
country. Almon observes that his new wares,
his improved forms, and his refined style of
decoration, opened a new field to enterprise,
improved the national taste, and gave England
an increased artistic reputation abroad. Mr.
Wedgwood was a fellow of the Royal Society,
and of the Society of Antiquaries, and is known
to have contributed some papers to the
Philosophical Transactions. He was also the founder
and one of the principal leaders of the celebrated
"General Chamber of the Manufacturers of
Great Britain;" an association which did
infinite service in its time to the national industry
of the country. He died at Etruria on the 3rd
of January, 1795. Taken as a whole, his life
was uniformly blameless, useful, prosperous, and
happy; and his biographer is as much to be
congratulated on the subject of her task as on
the manner in which she has executed so much
of it as is yet before the public. Such lives are
good to write, and pleasant to read; and their
importance from some points of view can scarcely
be rated at too high a value.

WINE AGAINST PHYSIC.

THE sensible doctor of the present day, unlike
the doctor of the past day, believes in good victual
and drink, and does not believe, as he used to
believe, in the perilous filth of drugs. Drugs
used by men discreetly skilled are of the utmost
use, are essentials of life now and then. But
only now and then. And ah, those draughts,
six in a parcel, that delight the Lady Lacquer
Daisy, and whose almost daily arrival is as good
as a new moon for making her lord turn his
money in his pocket. If Doctor Didill could
only feel his fees to be as safe when he orders
the refreshing tonic, cheaper and infinitely
better, of a well chosen light wine, as when he
produces, with occasional affectations of change,
cabalistic scrawls that conjure up dire substitutes
of the apothecary for the delicious stimulants
and tonics that God gives us, let him be
as mercenary as he seldom is but often is
believed to be, and he would throw much of his
physic to the dogs. For would he not find the
wine-merchant a pleasanter ally than the drug-
merchant? An occasional hamper of Burgundy
would be a more welcome testimonial than any
quantity of sarsaparilla.

The difficulty in the way of the doctors is
yearly diminishing. Year by year the number
is greater of people who know that when pills,
powders, electuaries, draughts, mixtures, set
in a strong current down their throats, they
are being doubly punished, a doctor's bill is
being made at the expense of their intestines.
It is hard that attack should be made upon the
pocket and the stomach too. But you would
have it, Monsieur Dandin, you would have it.
You wanted to see value for the money you
paid to your medical adviser, and thought, till
lately, that value was to be measured by the
quantity of filth you swallowed. Now you are
beginning to find out that the man deserves to
be paid best who relieves you from serious
illness most quickly, making the least fuss, and
with least use of drugs, neither affecting to
despise them nor overvaluing them, but using
them, when they seem to him needed, in a firm,
decisive way, and never thinking a drug necessary
when he can do its work with a good,
wholesome, dietetic substitute.

And let it be remembered gratefully that
this improved method of practice begins with
the doctors themselves. We have heard from
one of the greatest wholesale drug dealers in
this country, that the falling off in the supply
of drugs to a large number of private
practitioners who make up their own medicines, has
been of late years so great, that at first it was
supposed customers were leaving their old
druggists and getting part of their supply
elsewhere. But it soon appeared that this was not
the case, and that the change indicated a rapid
advance in a wholesome change of system. But
many an honest practitioner, especially in the
country, loses patients by appearing lax in
treatment of a case that he abstains from
complicating with the artificial disease set up by
the action of unnecessary drugs, or by appearing
to charge too much, when he may have saved
his patient from months of distress, or even
from death, by incessant watchfulness and
skilled advice. Says the ignorant patient, with
the air of one who is much put upon, why, he
only sent me four bottles of medicine! And
in a country parish there is too often, ready to
take his place, one of the large body of
unskilful practitioners who can only succeed by
truckling to the prejudices of every well-to-do
victim who may call him in. Only four bottles
of medicine, and those perhaps not nasty
enough. For it used to be devoutly believed
by the majority of sick people that in physic
nastiness is power. In many parts of England
the poor do not believe in medicine unless it
"scours them;" and practitioners are almost
forced, whenever it is safe to do so, to begin
with a "scouring" to establish confidence. Very
common, too, is the case of a young doctor
known to us, who, in the early days of his
practice, lost one of his best patients because
he sent her a four-ounce bottle containing four