John Taylor, Junr., survived his father more than fifteen years, and to the last had a lucrative business in Hatton Garden. His father had been oculist to George the Second; but this post, on the death of the Chevalier, he failed to obtain, it being given to a foreign _protégé_ of the Duke of Bedford's. He made a great noise about the sufferings of the poor, and proposed to the different parishes of London to attend the paupers labouring under diseases of the eye at two guineas a-year for each parish. He was an illiterate, vulgar, and licentious scoundrel; and yet when he died, on the 17th September, 1787, he was honoured with a long memoir in the _Gentleman's Magazine_, as one "whose philanthropy was exerted so fully as to class him with a Hanway or a Howard." If an apology is needed for giving so much space, in a chapter devoted to the ladies, to the John Taylors, it must be grounded on the fact that the Chevalier was the son of an honest widow woman who carried on a respectable business, as an apothecary and doctress, at Norwich. In this she resembled Mrs. Blood, the wife of the Colonel of that name, who for years supported herself and son at Romford, by keeping an apothecary's shop under the name of Weston. Colonel Blood was also himself a member of the Faculty. For some time, whilst meditating his _grand coup_, he practised as a doctor in an obscure part of the City, under the name of Ayliffe. Two hundred years since the lady practitioners of medicine in the provinces not seldom had working for them pupils and assistants of the opposite sex, and this usage was maintained in secluded districts till a comparatively recent date. In Houghton's Collection, Nov. 15, 1695, is the following advertisement,--"If any Apothecary's Widow that keeps a shop in the country wants a journeyman that has lived 25 years for himself in London, and has had the conversation of the eminent physicians of the colledge, I can help to such an one." CHAPTER XVII. MESSENGER MONSEY. Amongst the celebrities of the medical profession, who have left no memorial behind them more durable or better known than their wills in Doctors' Commons, was Messenger Monsey, the great-grandfather of our ex-Chancellor, Lord Cranworth. We do not know whether his Lordship is aware of his descent from the eccentric physician. Possibly he is not, for the Monseys, though not altogether of a plebeian stock, were little calculated to throw éclat over the genealogy of a patrician house.