house still standing, and known as Hall's Croft. To his wife, the poet's elder daughter, Shakespeare bequeathed his house and grounds, which Dr. Hall occupied when he died. His grave is near that of his glorious father-in-law, and on it is the following inscription : "HERE LYETH YE BODY OF JOHN HALL, Hallius hic situs est medica celeberrimus arte Dignus erat meritis qui Nestora vinceret annis, Ne tumulo, quid desit adest fidissima conjux Et vitæ Comitem nunc quoque mortis habet." D Dickens' Doctors. BY THOMAS FROST. ICKENS, it must be admitted by even the greatest admirers of his inimitable genius, among whom the writer of this paper must be counted, was not successful in his delineations of the medical profession. Though his most humorous as well as his most pathetic pictures of human life are drawn from the humbler walks in the pilgrimage of humanity, he has given us some good touches of his skill in his presentments of other professions, and notably of lawyers and lawyers' clerks. Nothing in fiction can excel his legal characters in, for instance, "Bleak House," his Mr. Tulkinghorn, Mr. Guppy, the clerk, and Mr. Snagsby, the law stationer. But a life-like doctor cannot be found in his works, and the nearest approaches to such a description are the merest sketches. The most strongly marked of these are Dr. Parker Peps and Mr. Pilkins, the two members of the faculty who officiate at the closing scene in the life of Mrs. Dombey, in which a sense of humour, with difficulty suppressed by the author, mingles with the touching sadness of the death. Dr. Parker Peps, "one of the Court physicians, and a man of immense reputation for assisting at the increase of great families," is introduced "walking up and down the drawingroom with his hands behind him, to the unspeakable admiration of the family surgeon, who had regularly puffed the case for the last six weeks among all his friends and acquaintances as one to which he was in hourly expectation, day and night, of being summoned in conjunction with Dr. Parker Peps." But in this little interlude, the two actors in which do not appear again, the obsequiousness of Mr. Pilkins to the Court physician, and the manner in which the latter, with assumed obliviousness, substitutes "her grace, the duchess" or "her ladyship" for Mrs. Dombey, verge on caricature, a tendency Dickens seems to have had at all times some difficulty in resisting. Of Dr. Slammer also we have only a sketch, and that of the slightest character. Though he is described as one of the most popular personages in his own circle," we gather from the incidents in which he appears only that he was very irascible. As we read of his furious jealousy of Jingle, and the interrupted duel with Winkle, who had received his challenge to the former by mistake, we wonder at the circle in which this "little fat man, with a ring of upright black hair round his head, and an extensive bald plain on the top of it," was one of the most popular personages. Harold Skimpole, we are told, had been educated for the medical profession; but his training seems to have left no traces of it upon his character or his conversation. He prefers to dabble in literature and music for his own amusement, and look to his friends for the means of living, too prosaic an occupation for himself. One of the best, but not quite the best, of the medical characters in Dickens' novels, is Allan Woodcourt, who "had gone out a poor ship's surgeon, and had come home nothing better," -the young man hastily called in when the death of Nemo is discovered, in conjunction with "a testy medical man, brought from his dinner, with a broad snuffy upper lip, and a broad Scotch tongue." Allan Woodcourt has the kindness of heart which characterises the profession, and exemplifies it very pleasingly in And the scene with the brickmaker's wife, and with poor Jo, the forlorn waif who is kept continually moving on by the police. How tenderly, too, he deals with Richard Carstone, the weak-minded victim of the long-drawn Chancery suit. his head is as sound as his heart is soft. "You," says Richard to him, "can pursue your art for its own sake, and can put your hand to the plough and never turn; and can strike a purpose out of anything." What a world of difference we see in this briefly sketched trait to the want of earnestness of purpose and steadfastness of pursuit in the character of young Carstone ! Even stronger testimony to the good qualities of Allan Woodcourt is borne by Mr. Jarndyce. Allan, says that gentleman, is "a man whose hopes and aims may sometimes lie (as most men's sometimes do, I dare say) above the ordinary level, but to whom the ordinary level will be high enough after all, if it should prove to be a way of usefulness and good service leading to no other. All generous spirits are ambitious, I suppose; but the ambition that calmly trusts itself to such a road, instead of spasmodically trying to fly over it, is the kind I care for. It is Woodcourt's kind." The love passages of this estimable |