prospect for a lad of spirit, with the blood of
the early Malkinshaws (who were Rogues of
great capacity and distinction in the feudal
times), coursing adventurous through every
vein! I look back on my career, and when
I remember the patience with which I
accepted a medical destiny, I appear to
myself in the light of a hero. Nay, I even went
beyond the passive virtue of accepting my
destiny—I actually studied, I made the
acquaintance of the skeleton, I was on friendly
terms with the muscular system, and the
mysteries of Physiology dropped in on me in
the kindest manner whenever they had an
evening to spare. Even this was not the
worst of it. I disliked the abstruse studies of
my new profession; but I absolutely hated the
diurnal slavery of qualifying myself, in a
social point of view, for future success in it.
My fond medical parent insisted on
introducing me to his whole connection. I went
round visiting in the neat brougham—with a
stethescope and medical review in the front-
pocket, with Doctor Softly by my side, keeping
his face well in view at the window—to
canvas for patients, in the character of my
father's hopeful successor. Never have I been
so ill at ease in prison, as I was in that
carriage. I have felt more at home in the
dock (such is the natural depravity and
perversity of my disposition) than ever I felt in
the drawing-rooms of my father's
distinguished patrons and respectable friends. Nor
did my miseries end with the morning calls.
I was commanded to attend all dinner-
parties, and to make myself agreeable at all
balls. The dinners were the worst trial.
Sometimes, indeed, we contrived to get
ourselves asked to the houses of high and mighty
entertainers, where we ate and drank the best
of victuals and liquors, and fortified ourselves
sensibly and snugly in that way against the
frigidity of the company. Of these repasts
I have no hard words to say; it is of the
dinners we gave ourselves, and of the dinners
which people in our rank of life gave to us,
that I now bitterly complain.

I have already alluded to the remarkable
adherence to set forms of speech which
characterises the talkers of arrant nonsense.
Precisely the same sheepish following of one
given example distinguishes the ordering of
genteel dinners. When we gave a dinner at
home, we had gravy soup, turbot and lobster-
sauce, haunch of mutton, boiled fowls and
tongue, lukewarm oyster-patties and sticky
curry for side dishes ; wild duck, cabinet-
pudding, jelly, cream, and tartlets. All
excellent things, except when you have to eat
them continually. We lived upon them
entirely in the season. Every one of our
hospitable friends gave us a return-dinner,
which was a perfect copy of ours—just as
ours was a perfect copy of theirs, last year.
They boiled what we boiled, and we roasted
what they roasted. We none of us ever
changed the succession of the courses—or
made more or less of them—or altered the
position of the fowls opposite the mistress
and the haunch opposite the master. My
stomach used to quail within me, in those
times, when the tureen was taken off and the
inevitable gravy-soup smell renewed its daily
acquaintance with my nostrils, and warned
me of the persistent eatable formalities that
were certain to follow. I suppose that honest
people, who have known what it is to get no
dinner (being a Rogue, I have myself never
wanted for one), have gone through some
very acute suffering under that privation. It
may be some consolation to them to
know that, next to absolute starvation,
the same company-dinner, every day, is one
of the hardest trials that assail human endurance
I date my first serious determination
to throw over the medical profession at the
earliest convenient opportunity, from the
second season's series of dinners at which
my aspirations, as a rising physician,
unavoidably and regularly condemned me to be
present.

The opportunity I wanted presented
itself in a curious way, and led,
unexpectedly enough, to some rather important
consequences. I have already stated, among
the other branches of human attainment
which I acquired at the public school, that
I learnt to draw caricatures of the masters
who were so obliging as to educate me. I had
a natural faculty for this useful department of
art. I improved it greatly by practice in
secret after I left school, and I ended by
making it a source of profit and pocket-
money to me when I entered the medical
profession. What was I to do ? I could not
expect for years to make a halfpenny, as a
physician. My genteel walk in life led me
away from all immediate sources of emolument,
and my father could only afford to
give me an allowance which was too
preposterously small to be mentioned. I had
helped myself surreptitiously to pocket-money
at school, and I was obliged to repeat the
process, in another manner, at home! At
the time of which I write, the Art of
Caricature was just approaching the close of its
coloured and most extravagant stage of
development. The subtlety and truth to Nature
required for the pursuit of it now, had hardly
begun to be thought of then. Sheer farce and
coarse burlesque, with plenty of colour for the
money, still made up the sum of what the public,
of those days wanted. I was first assured
of my capacity for the production of these
requisites, by a medical friend of the ripe
critical age of nineteen. He knew a print-
publisher, and enthusiastically showed him
a portfolio full of my sketches, taking care
at my request not to mention my name.
Rather to my surprise (for I was too
conceited to be greatly amazed by the
circumstance), the publisher picked out a few of the
best of my wares, and boldly bought them of
me—of course, at his own price. From that