The examination at the College is altogether a more respectable ordeal than the jalap and rhubarb botheration at Apothecaries’ Hall, and par consequence, Mr. Muff goes up one evening with little misgivings as to his success.  After undergoing four different sets of examiners, he is told he may retire, and is conducted by Mr Belfour into “Paradise,” the room appropriated to the fortunate ones, which the curious stranger may see lighted up every Friday evening as he passes through Lincoln’s-inn Fields.  The inquisitors are altogether a gentlemanly set of men, who are willing to help a student out of a scrape, rather than “catch question” him into one:  nay, more than once the candidate has attributed his success to a whisper prompted by the kind heart of the venerable and highly-gifted individual—­now, alas! no more—­who until last year assisted at the examinations.

Of course, the same kind of scene takes place that was enacted after going up to the Hall, and with the same results, except the police-office, which they manage to avoid.  The next day, as usual, they are again at the school, standing innumerable pots, telling incalculable lies, and singing uncounted choruses, until the Scotch pupil who is still grinding in the museum, is forced to give over study, after having been squirted at through the keyhole five distinct times, with a reversed stomach-pump full of beer, and finally unkennelled.  The lecturer upon chemistry, who has a private pupil in his laboratory learning how to discover arsenic in poisoned people’s stomachs, where there is none, and make red, blue, and green fires, finds himself locked in, and is obliged to get out at the window; whilst the professor of medicine, who is holding forth, as usual, to a select very few, has his lecture upon intermittent fever so strangely interrupted by distant harmony and convivial hullaballoo, that he finishes abruptly in a pet, to the great joy of his class.  But Mr. Muff and his friends care not.  They have passed all their troubles—­they are regular medical men, and for aught they care the whole establishment may blow up, tumble down, go to blazes, or anything else in a small way that may completely obliterate it.  In another twelve hours they have departed to their homes, and are only spoken of in the reverence with which we regard the ruins of a by-gone edifice, as bricks who were.

* * * * *

Our task is finished.  We have traced Mr. Muff from the new man through the almost entomological stages of his being to his perfect state; and we take our farewell of him as the “general practitioner.”  In our Physiology we have endeavoured to show the medical student as he actually exists—­his reckless gaiety, his wild frolics, his open disposition.  That he is careless and dissipated we admit, but these attributes end with his pupilage; did they not do so spontaneously, the up-hill struggles and hardly-earned income of his laborious future career would, to use his own terms, “soon knock it all out of him;” although, in the after-waste of years, he looks back upon his student’s revelries with an occasional return of old feelings, not unmixed, however, with a passing reflection upon the lamentable inefficacy of the present course of medical education pursued at our schools and hospitals, to fit a man for future practice.