not a doctor. His art has no prominence. It is not shown how his
peculiarities influenced his work, nor how his art, and its use, altered
or modified the man. "The Country Doctor," by the same strong hand, is
far more near my ideal of what this portraiture should be than any other
known to me in French literature. The humorous aspects of a medical life
in the provinces of France are nicely handled in Jules Sandeau's "Doctor
Herbeau," but the study, however neat and pleasing, is slight.

Wander where you may, in the drama or the novel, you will still find, I
think, that the character of the physician awaits in its interesting
varieties competent portrayal.

Shakespeare has left us no finished portrait of a doctor. Molière
caricatured him. Thackeray failed to draw him, and generally in novels
he is merely a man who is labelled "Doctor." The sole exception known to
me is the marvellous delineation of Lydgate in "Middlemarch." He is all
over the physician, his manner, his sentiments, his modes of thought,
but he stands alone in fiction. How did that great mistress of her art
learn all of physicians which enabled her to leave us this amazingly
truthful picture? Her life gives us no clue, and when I asked her
husband, George Lewes, to explain the matter, he said that he did not
know, and that she knew no more of this than of how she had acquired her
strangely complete knowledge of the low turf people she has drawn in the
same book, and with an almost equal skill and truth to nature.

It were easy, I fancy, to point out how the doctor's life and training
differ from those of all the other professions, and how this must act on
peculiar individualities for the deepening of some lines and the erasure
of others; but this were too elaborate a study for my present gossiping
essay, and may await another day and a less lazy mood.