indifferent to public attacks; but it is a sort of dignity which it is
very difficult to maintain. As well might a man, when stung to madness
by wasps, endeavour to sit in his chair without moving a muscle, as
endure with patience and without reply the courtesies of a newspaper
opponent. Dr Thorne wrote a third letter which was too much for
medical flesh and blood to bear. Dr Fillgrave answered it, not,
indeed, in his own name, but in that of a brother doctor; and then the
war raged merrily. It is hardly too much to say that Dr Fillgrave
never knew another happy hour. Had he dreamed of what materials was
made that young compounder of doses at Greshamsbury he would have met
him in consultation, morning, noon, and night, without objection; but
having begun the war, he was constrained to go on with it: his brethren
would allow him no alternative. Thus he was continually being brought
up to the fight, as a prize-fighter may be seen to be, who is carried
up round after round, without any hope on his own part, and who, in
each round, drops to the ground before the very wind of his opponent's
blows.

But Dr Fillgrave, though thus weak himself, was backed in practice and
in countenance by nearly all his brethren in the county. The guinea
fee, the principle of giving advice and of selling no medicine, the
great resolve to keep a distinct barrier between the physician and the
apothecary, and, above all, the hatred of the contamination of a bill,
were strong in the medical mind of Barsetshire. Dr Thorne had the
provincial medical world against him, and so he appealed to the
metropolis. The Lancet took the matter up in his favour, but the
Journal of Medical Science was against him; the Weekly Chirurgeon,
noted for its medical democracy, upheld him as a medical prophet, but
the Scalping Knife, a monthly periodical got up in dead opposition to
the Lancet, showed him no mercy. So the war went on, and our doctor, to