precisely the same lectures, down to the smallest details:—­nay, I will tell the old fellows how to make a poultice.”  Soon after, when he was lecturing to the students at St. Bartholomew’s, and adverting to the College of Surgeons, he chucklingly exclaimed, “I told the big wigs how to make a poultice!” It is said by those who have witnessed it, that Mr Abernethy’s explanation of the art of making a poultice was irresistibly entertaining.

“Pray, Mr. Abernethy, what is a cure for gout?” was the question of an indolent and luxurious citizen.  “Live upon sixpence a-day—­and earn it!” was the pithy answer.

A scene of much entertainment once took place between our eminent surgeon and the famous John Philpot Curran.  Mr. Curran, it seems, being personally unknown to him, had visited Mr. Abernethy several times without having had an opportunity of fully explaining (as he thought) the nature of his malady:  at last, determined to have a hearing, when interrupted in his story, he fixed his dark bright eye on the “doctor,” and said—­“Mr. Abernethy, I have been here on eight different days, and I have paid you eight different guineas; but you have never yet listened to the symptoms of my complaint.  I am resolved, Sir, not to leave this room till you satisfy me by doing so.”  Struck by his manner, Mr. Abernethy threw himself back in his chair, and assuming the posture of a most indefatigable listener, exclaimed, in a tone of half surprise, half humour,—­“Oh! very well, Sir; I am ready to hear you out.  Go on, give me the whole—­your birth, parentage, and education.  I wait your pleasure; go on.”  Upon which Curran, not a whit disconcerted, gravely began:—­“My name is John Philpot Curran.  My parents were poor, but I believe honest people, of the province of Munster, where also I was born, at Newmarket, in the County of Cork, in the year one thousand seven hundred and fifty.  My father being employed to collect the rents of a Protestant gentleman, of small fortune, in that neighbourhood, procured my admission into one of the Protestant free-schools, where I obtained the first rudiments of my education.  I was next enabled to enter Trinity College, Dublin, in the humble sphere of a sizer:”—­and so he continued for several minutes, giving his astonished hearer a true, but irresistibly laughable account of his “birth, parentage, and education,” as desired, till he came to his illness and sufferings, the detail of which was not again interrupted.  It is hardly necessary to add, that Mr. Abernethy’s attention to his gifted patient was, from that hour to the close of his life, assiduous, unremitting, and devoted.