language by one Jean de Schelandre; “The Fate of Majesty exemplified in the barbarous and disloyal treatment (by traitorous and undutiful subjects) of the Kings and Queens of the Royal House of Stuart,” genealogies of the Stuarts in English, French and Latin; a fine copy of “Eikon Basilike,” bound in old red morocco, with the royal arms stamped upon the cover; and many other volumes on the same subject, the names of which (although as a boy I was wont to pore over their contents with profound awe and sympathy) I have now for the most part forgotten.

Most persons, I suppose, have observed how the example of a successful ancestor is apt to determine the pursuits of his descendants down to the third and fourth generations, inclining the lads of this house to the sea, and of that to the bar, according as the great man of the family achieved his honors on shipboard, or climbed his way to the woolsack.  The Arbuthnots offered no exception to this very natural law of selection.  They could not help remembering how the famous doctor had excelled in literature as in medicine; how he had been not only Physician in Ordinary to Queen Anne and Prince George of Denmark, but a satirist and pamphleteer, a wit and the friend of wits—­of such wits as Pope and Swift, Harley and Bolingbroke.  Hence they took, as it were instinctively, to physic and the belles lettres, and were never without a doctor or an author in the family.

My father, however, like the great Martinus Scriblerus, was both doctor and author.  And he was a John Arbuthnot.  And to carry the resemblance still further, he was gifted with a vein of rough epigrammatic humor, in which it pleased his independence to indulge without much respect of persons, times, or places.  His tongue, indeed, cost him some friends and gained him some enemies; but I am not sure that it diminished his popularity as a physician.  People compared him to Abernethy, whereby he was secretly flattered.  Some even went so far as to argue that only a very clever man could afford to be a bear; and I must say that he pushed this conclusion to its farthest limit, showing his temper alike to rich and poor upon no provocation whatever.  He cared little, to be sure, for his connection.  He loved the profession theoretically, and from a scientific point of view; but he disliked the drudgery of country practice, and stood in no need of its hardly-earned profits.  Yet he was a man who so loved to indulge his humor, no matter at what cost, that I doubt whether he would have been more courteous had his bread depended on it.  As it was, he practised and grumbled, snarled at his patients, quarrelled with the rich, bestowed his time and money liberally upon the poor, and amused his leisure by writing for a variety of scientific periodicals, both English and foreign.