ut appeal, resistance, or benefit
of clergy. My Lord Southdown, her late husband, an epileptic and
simple-minded nobleman, was in the habit of approving of everything
which his Matilda did and thought. So that whatever changes her own
belief might undergo (and it accommodated itself to a prodigious
variety of opinion, taken from all sorts of doctors among the
Dissenters) she had not the least scruple in ordering all her tenants
and inferiors to follow and believe after her. Thus whether she
received the Reverend Saunders McNitre, the Scotch divine; or the
Reverend Luke Waters, the mild Wesleyan; or the Reverend Giles Jowls,
the illuminated Cobbler, who dubbed himself Reverend as Napoleon
crowned himself Emperor--the household, children, tenantry of my Lady
Southdown were expected to go down on their knees with her Ladyship,
and say Amen to the prayers of either Doctor. During these exercises
old Southdown, on account of his invalid condition, was allowed to sit
in his own room, and have negus and the paper read to him. Lady Jane
was the old Earl's favourite daughter, and tended him and loved him
sincerely: as for Lady Emily, the authoress of the "Washerwoman of
Finchley Common," her denunciations of future punishment (at this
period, for her opinions modified afterwards) were so awful that they
used to frighten the timid old gentleman her father, and the physicians
declared his fits always occurred after one of her Ladyship's sermons.

"I will certainly call," said Lady Southdown then, in reply to the
exhortation of her daughter's pretendu, Mr. Pitt Crawley--"Who is Miss
Crawley's medical man?"

Mr. Crawley mentioned the name of Mr. Creamer.

"A most dangerous and ignorant practitioner, my dear Pitt. I have
providentially been the means of removing him from several houses:
though in one or two instances I did not arrive in time. I could not
save poor dear General Glanders, who was dying under the hands of that
ignorant man--dying. He rallied a little under the Podgers' pills
which I administered to him; but alas! it was too late. His death was
delightful, however; and his change was only for the better; Creamer,
my dear Pitt, must leave your aunt."

Pitt expressed his perfect acquiescence. He, too, had been carried
along by the energy of his noble kinswoman, and future mother-in-law.
He had been made to accept Saunders McNitre, Luke Waters, Giles Jowls,
Podgers' Pills, Rodgers' Pills, Pokey's Elixir, ever