shall seem at home, as such, among the other characters of
the novel,--one, at least, who shall appear to any reasonable degree
like a doctor to those who really know the genus doctor thoroughly. Save
Lydgate, no doctor in fiction answers this critical demand, or seems
anything to me but a very stiff lay figure from the moment he is called
upon to bring his art into the story, or to figure, except as an
unprofessional personage.

Nor does this arise from poverty of types in the tribe of physicians.
The training of a doctor's life produces the most varied effects for
good or evil, as may chance, upon the human natures submitted to its
discipline, so that I think any thoughtful medical man will tell you
that there is a more notable individuality among his brethren in middle
life than among most of the people he encounters. As for the novelist's
effort--an inartistic one, it seems to me--to bring on his stage
representations of some especial kind of doctor, I have only a grim
smile to give, remembering Mr. Reade's grewsome medico in "Hard
Cash,"--a personation meant, I suppose, to present to the public a
certain irregular London doctor, but which, to the minds of most
physicians, reads like an elaborate advertisement of the man in
question.

Sir Bulwer Lytton's renderings of a homoeopath and a water-cure
specialist are open to the same charge, and could only have been
successful in the hands of a master.

There are at least two doctors in Balzac's novels. Rastignac, man of
fashion and science, is drawn with the master's usual skill, but he is
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. Moliere
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 marve