“I know little of either,” said Lydgate; “but in general, appointments are apt to be made too much a question of personal liking.  The fittest man for a particular post is not always the best fellow or the most agreeable.  Sometimes, if you wanted to get a reform, your only way would be to pension off the good fellows whom everybody is fond of, and put them out of the question.”

Dr. Sprague, who was considered the physician of most “weight,” though Dr. Minchin was usually said to have more “penetration,” divested his large heavy face of all expression, and looked at his wine-glass while Lydgate was speaking.  Whatever was not problematical and suspected about this young man—­for example, a certain showiness as to foreign ideas, and a disposition to unsettle what had been settled and forgotten by his elders—­ was positively unwelcome to a physician whose standing had been fixed thirty years before by a treatise on Meningitis, of which at least one copy marked “own” was bound in calf.  For my part I have some fellow-feeling with Dr. Sprague:  one’s self-satisfaction is an untaxed kind of property which it is very unpleasant to find deprecated.

Lydgate’s remark, however, did not meet the sense of the company.  Mr. Vincy said, that if he could have his way, he would not put disagreeable fellows anywhere.

“Hang your reforms!” said Mr. Chichely.  “There’s no greater humbug in the world.  You never hear of a reform, but it means some trick to put in new men.  I hope you are not one of the `Lancet’s’ men, Mr. Lydgate—­wanting to take the coronership out of the hands of the legal profession:  your words appear to point that way.”

“I disapprove of Wakley,” interposed Dr. Sprague, “no man more:  he is an ill-intentioned fellow, who would sacrifice the respectability of the profession, which everybody knows depends on the London Colleges, for the sake of getting some notoriety for himself.  There are men who don’t mind about being kicked blue if they can only get talked about.  But Wakley is right sometimes,” the Doctor added, judicially.  “I could mention one or two points in which Wakley is in the right.”

“Oh, well,” said Mr. Chichely, “I blame no man for standing up in favor of his own cloth; but, coming to argument, I should like to know how a coroner is to judge of evidence if he has not had a legal training?”

“In my opinion,” said Lydgate, “legal training only makes a man more incompetent in questions that require knowledge a of another kind.  People talk about evidence as if it could really be weighed in scales by a blind Justice.  No man can judge what is good evidence on any particular subject, unless he knows that subject well.  A lawyer is no better than an old woman at a post-mortem examination.  How is he to know the action of a poison?  You might as well say that scanning verse will teach you to scan the potato crops.”

“You are aware, I suppose, that it is not the coroner’s business to conduct the post-mortem, but only to take the evidence of the medical witness?” said Mr. Chichely, with some scorn.