head-gear--but we see no reason for carrying this dispatch into the
Court of Chancery, and insisting that every nod of the woolsack is to
decide a suit at law. Yet have the lawyer and the physician both
adopted the impetuous practices of the manufacturing world, and
Haste, red haste! is now the cry.

Lord Brougham's Chancery practice was only to be equalled by one of
Lord Waterford's steeple-chases. He took all before him in a fly--he
rode straight, plenty of neck, baulked nothing--up leap or down leap,
sunk fence or double ditch, post and rail, or quickset, stone wall, or
clay bank, all one to him--go it he would. Others might deny his
judgment; he wanted to get over the ground, and _that_ he did do.

The West-end physician, in the same way, visits his fifty patients
daily, walks his hospital, delivers a lecture to old ladies about some
"curious provision" of nature in the palm of the human hand (for
fee-taking); and devoting something like three minutes and twelve
seconds to each sick man's case, pockets some twenty thousand per
annum by his dispatch.

Speed is now the _El Dorado_. Jelly is advertised to be made in a
minute, butter in five, soup seasoned and salted in three seconds of
time. Even the Quakers--bless their quiet hearts!--couldn't escape the
contagion, and actually began to walk and talk with some faint
resemblance to ordinary mortals. The church alone maintained the even
tenor of its way, and moved not in the wild career of the whirlwind
world about it. Such was my gratulation, when my eye fell upon the
following passage of the _Times_. Need I say with what a heavy heart I
read it? It is Mr. Rushton who speaks:--

"In the month of December, 1841, he heard that a man had
been found dead in the streets of Liverpool; that all the
property he possessed had been taken from his person, and
that an attempt to trace his identity had been made in
vain. He was taken to the usual repository for the dead,
where an inquest had been held upon him, and from the 'dead
house,' as it was called, he was removed to the workhouse
burial-ground. The man who drove the hearse on the occasion
was very old, and not very capable of giving evidence. His
attendant was an idiot. It had been represented to Mr.
Hodgson and himself that the dead man had been taken in the
clothes in which he died and put into a coffin which was too
small for him; that a shroud was pu