last in the bosom of his devoted relatives and friends, at the home of his choice, and amid the glorious scenery which he has done so much to render famous throughout the civilized world. He had completed the eightieth year of his age on the seventh day of the month in which all that was mortal of him died. In person he was tall and muscular. He had a large and noble head, with a keen and penetrating eye, a countenance lighted with benevolence, and a forehead almost as expansive and majestic as that chiselled on the busts which purport to resemble Shakspeare. He was an eloquent talker, and somewhat loquacious, nor without an egotism of manner, which probably resulted from his usually recluse separation from society. He was, however, eminently kind and tolerant, and was universally beloved by his neighbours, from the poorest peasant in the vale to the wealthiest and most distinguished of the lake residents.

His political character has been finely, and at the same time justly, "In Wordsworth," he says, drawn by Coleridge. 66 we find, first, an austere purity of language, both grammatically and logically; in short, a perfect appropriateness of the words to the meaning. Secondly, a correspondent weight and sanity of the sentiments, won not from books but from the poet's own meditations. They are fresh, and have the dew upon them. Even throughout his smaller poems, there is not one which is not rendered valuable by some just and original reflection. Thirdly, the sinewy strength and originality of single lines and paragraphs; the frequent curiosa felicitas of his diction. Fourthly, the perfect truth of nature in his images and descriptions, as taken immediately from nature, and proving a long and genial intimacy with the very spirit which gives a physiognomic expression to all the works of nature. Fifthly, a meditative pathos, a union of deep and subtle thought with sensibility; a sympathy with man as man; the sympathy, indeed, of a contemplater rather than a fellow-sufferer and co-mate; but of a contemplation from whose view no difference of rank conceals the sameness of the nature; no injuries of wind or weather, or toil, or even of ignorance, wholly disguise the human face divine. Last, and pre-eminently, I challenge for this poet the gift of imagination in the highest and strictest sense of the word. In the play of fancy, Wordsworth, to my feelings, is always graceful, and sometimes recondite. The likeness is occasionally too strange, or demands too peculiar a point of view, or is such as appears the creature of predetermined research rather than spontaneous presentation. Indeed, his fancy seldom displays itself as mere and unmodified fancy. But in imaginative power he stands nearest of all modern writers to Shakspeare and Milton, and yet in a mind perfectly unborrowed and his own. To employ his own words, which are at once an instance and an illustration, he does, indeed, to all thoughts and to all objects—

THE FIRST DOCTORS.

PART II.

WE have already seen that the sacerdotal colleges amongst the heathen nations of antiquity were the only depositories of the collected knowledge acquired by a long experience. India shows to us its Magi, versed in the study of natural history and medicine. Egypt reveals its priests preserving carefully iatric, or healing formula, in the depths of its temples. In the early times of heroic Greece, it was the ministers of worship, or their initiated disciples, who perpetuated in their family the art of healing and working prodigies. The Scythians had also their thaumaturgists in Zamolxis and Abaris, and amongst the Celts there were still priests and Druids, who enjoyed the only celebrity in the profound sciences. We are not to imagine that those early practitioners were not valuable agents for the cure and management of disease. There is sufficient attestation in the records of the time that at Epidaurus, and other celebrated health resorts, such resources as were available, dangerous maladies were frequently cured.

There is no doubt that extraordinary success, considering the state in which medical science existed, followed the course of treatment adopted. From all parts of Greece, from remote Egypt, and sometimes even from distant India, the diseased, the worn-out, and debilitated, sought the opportunities of health afforded at those places. It was only the rich, however, to whom they were available. The expense-ever a distinguishing characteristic of such resorts-had as much deterrent influence upon the ancient people, who had a reverence for their celebrity, but were poor as to the same class is, borne by such haunts for health as Baden-Baden, Ems, Madeira, or Nice, to-day. But, beside the real value which was obtained in the natural or chemical resources of those life-giving localities, there was a fictitious stimulant afforded also by the wiles of the guardians of the temples of the heathen. The trade of these men, like their religion, was a traffic of falsehood. In order to increase the attractions of these resorts, they introduced instances of supernatural cures, which were carried out by clever pretenders. The learned Baronius, in his "Annals," quotes a Greek inscription, found at the temple of Esculapius, at Rome, which illustrates how far they carried deception for their own purposes. This inscription contains an account of various miraculous cures performed in public, and eminently calculated to impose upon the vulgar and deluded. It has been ascertained beyond a doubt by modern science what a vast influence is exercised by the meutal upon the corporal functions; and, no doubt, this system of imposition had its advantages upon nervous or sensitive individuals; and there is no doubt that persons suffering under many forms of hypochondriac or hysterical diseases must have received benefit from the means thus adopted.

Those were the first doctors of the human race. They found disease, without a hindrance, exercising its terrible sway amongst men, and they

availed themselves of skill and observation to stay its scathing progress. It was a great task. Physic and chemistry only existed amongst the ancients in a state of empiricism, that is, as a fact afforded by chance or acquired by researches without theory. They were transmitted to the initiated, who, in their turn transmitted them to others. Democritus was the only man of antiquity who felt the necessity to experimentalize and to classify results. It was for want of system that the physico-chemical knowledge of the ancients has made no progress, and, for the most part, has been lost to time. A strange circumstance, however, must be noted in this state of things. Although possessing a degree of knowledge far beyond that generally current, the sacerdotal colleges of the heathens, consistent with the darkness and falsehood of their religion, did not spread their knowledge amidst the people. This course would have been the first work of any who would hasten civilization. On the contrary, they enveloped their operations in the shadows of mystery, in order to make men believe that they held communication with the divinity. They made use of a secret language known only to themselves, the character of which served them to write their formularies, or afforded them the details of the mode of preparing divers drugs and substances more or less active upon the human economy. It is in this species of magical pharmacopiæ shut carefully from the vulgar, that they recorded the receipts suitable to produce such or such an effect.

From the documents which ancient history furnishes us, the thaumatur gists ought to be very advanced in this portion of the art, and their means were numerous and varied. We shall have occasion to see that they employed not only drugs, simple and compound, but that they had recourse to perfumes, to odours, to music, and to strong moral impressions, to exercise influence upon the system of humanity. The only view we can obtain of them in this way is mingled with the shadows of fable; but yet it is a glimpse sufficient of the manner in which these first practitioners of the healing art used the knowledge which they attained. Purposes of hallucination seem to have been the great use made of drugs amongst them. The mysteries of Misithra, of Isis, of Samothrace, and of Eleusis, discover to us here and there, amongst the exaggerated descriptions of antiquity, the various secrets employed for the deception even of the initiated. One time it is ambrosia which exalts the spirit, another it is the draught of Lethe that bestowed forgetfulness; again, it is nepenthe which calms the most lively, and plunges whoso quaffed it into a state of happiness ineffable. Everywhere there are draughts, unctions, and baths, where we recognise without difficulty the action of stimulant and narcotic substances. Such is the action of the physical upon the mental organism, that in their union in the body, substances can act upon the latter through the former. Homer contains episodes of the power of the magic of Circe, which, explained by our modern knowledge, makes what seems a fable easily understood. The story of her metamorphosis of Calchus is one of those. The wily sorceress knew the secrets of stupifying drugs, and used them on the King of the Daunians. Troubled with his addresses, she asked him to a banquet. There she gave

him draughts of rich wine, and after a cup of this, drugged with some soporific, he fell into a state of imbecility, and Circe had him conveyed to a stable. The story goes that he was turned into an ox, but the truth is, that when a glimmer of understanding returned to the prince, beholding himself surrounded by oxen, swine, and sheep, his half stupified intellect lost its individuality, and he believed in his metamorphosis. When his intellect was about mastering the effects of the potion, and the vapours of stupidity began to be dissipated, she despatched him to his own kingdom. The metamorphosis of the companions of Ulysses is explained in the same manner. The herb Moly, a preparation of which was taken at the command of their chief, indicates antidote, which withdrew them from the stupid condition into which they were plunged.

We find other instances in which drugs were used for a different purpose, and for the production of a different influence upon men. The dervishes of India drink a liquor known only to themselves, and arrive at that degree of exaltation which makes them despise all dangers, and brave the most atrocious pains. They precipitate themselves boldly upon lances, upon naked swords, cut off their own noses and ears, maim their bodies, and inflict ghastly wounds upon themselves without giving any signs of pain. The widows of Malabar drink a potion which the priests administer to them before going to the funeral pyre, where, according to the accursed rites of their religion, they must be sacrificed. When they have drunk this, they mount the pile, and seating themselves on the burning scaffold, they are devoured by the flames without making the least groan. In 1822, an English traveller ocularly witnessed one of those sacrifices, saw the victim of this barbarous custom arrive at the fatal scene in a state of complete physical insensibility, by reason of the violent effect of the drugs which they had made her swallow. He describes her eyes as being stupidly open. answered mechanically to the legal questions which were addressed to her on the voluntary nature of her immolation, and when aided to mount the pile, she showed the symptoms of a complete narcotism. The Hebrew Chronicles detail the composition of a liquor which stupified the victims of their capital punishment. Apuleius relates the execution of a traitor, who, having been prepared for his immolation by a narcotic potion, was burned alive without making a single cry.

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In such details we find the results of the first experience of the power of drugs, and we are afforded evidence of the uses to which they were put. Strange and unusual as it may seem to us were those appropriations, yet, to those practical experiments we are indebted for the foundation of medical science. The great bulk of men professing a knowledge of the influence of the products of certain plants, or certain minerals, upon the human economy, directed that knowledge only to charlatanism-tricks of trade-medical sleight-of-hand-and made no effort to follow out discovery, or to impel study to benefit humanity by its comparisons or experience. The consequence of this condition of things is to be understood in the state in which medicine is found practised in barbarous countries. In countries even not barbarous, but isolated,-in China, for instance-it exists at a very low

ebb. This is one of the greatest, most ancient, and civilized empires on the face of the earth. Two thousand years ago, when Europe was savage as Kaffirland, China was great, populous, and highly civilised, and yet, amongst the native physicians of that country, no such good medical aid can be had from them as a medical student of one year's standing in Europe would afford. Dr. Gillan, a Scotch physician, who was attached to the British embassy under Lord Macartney, declares that they knew neither the use of blood-letting, nor how to set a fractured bone. After the destruction of the Roman Empire, the study of medicine remained to be carried on by isolated effort, and it was in the middle ages at a very low ebb. Amongst the monastic communities alone had it any pretensions to science, to order, and to usefulness. Members of the orders of religion, preserving the remnant of literature saved from antiquity, had that enlightenment alone which could render the art of medicine, as then practised, of any value, and it was only as the Church emancipated the world from the iron rule of feudalism by the spread of learning, that the science grew. The dreams of the alchemists, however, who dabbled in the practice, had a very malign influence upon its progress. They followed out theories in which folly and daring were mingled, and reduced its elements once more to superstition. The practice of medicine now, under such circumstances, no longer deserved the name, encumbered with arcana, panaceas, wondrous elixirs, and the aggregation of all quackery. Curious it is to remember that the human race was ever so insensate, as to be deceived by such folly, or by such fraud, but for many an age it was so. Now, however, in civilized countries pretences of this kind, have fallen into the contempt they so richly deserve. The progress of this science, however, like those of every other, had its martyrs. The physician, in the barbarous times of early Europe, although he might attempt to save the lives of others, too often ran the risk of losing his own. The beautiful Austragilda, for instance, wife of Gunthram, King of Burgundy and Orleans, son of Clothaire, upon her death-bed, requested of her husband that the two physicians who had attended her during her last illness should be buried with her. She had believed that to their remedies ought to be attributed the loss of her life, and upon this account she demanded their immolation. Gunthram had the weakness to promise this sacrifice to her, and he had the weakness to keep his word. Though buried in the same sepulchre, and with the honours of royalty, might be esteemed an honour, yet it is quite certain those men did not appreciate their position as being very valuable.

It was after the growth of the universities of Europe, after the rise of Padua, Parma, Rome, and Paris, that medicine took the influence of progress, and in the hands of men of genius afforded some promise of its future fame and merit. With all his faults and absurdities, it owes a great deal to the celebrated Paracelsus. With him knowledge became a passion, somewhat misguided, and often erring. His life was passed in its pursuit, and very much of the impulse of his own vivid nature was communicated to those around him. The son of an apothecary, he was instructed in his art, and made the greatest progress in such chemistry as the age afforded. He visited the principal cities and universities of Europe. He consulted every