Messenger Monsey was born in 1693, and received in early life an excellent education; for though his father at the Revolution threw his lot in with the nonjurors, and forfeited his living, the worthy clergyman had a sufficient paternal estate to enable him to rear his only child without any painful considerations of cost. After spending five years at St. Mary's Hall, Cambridge, Messenger studied physic for some time under Sir Benjamin Wrench, at Norwich. Starting on his own account, he practised for a while at Bury St. Edmunds, in Suffolk, but with little success. He worked hard, and yet never managed in that prosperous and beautiful country town to earn more than three hundred guineas in the same year. If we examined into the successes of medical celebrities, we should find in a great majority of cases fortune was won by the aspirant either annexing himself to, and gliding into the confidence of, a powerful clique, or else by his being through some lucky accident thrown in the way of a patron. Monsey's rise was of the latter sort. He was still at Bury, with nothing before him but the prospect of working all his days as a country doctor, when Lord Godolphin, son of Queen Anne's Lord Treasurer, and grandson of the great Duke of Marlborough, was seized, on the road to Newmarket, with an attack of apoplexy. Bury was the nearest point where medical assistance could be obtained. Monsey was summoned, and so fascinated his patient with his conversational powers that his Lordship invited him to London, and induced him to relinquish his country practice. From that time Monsey's fortune was made. He became to the Whigs very much what, in the previous generation, Radcliffe had been to the Tories. Sir Robert Walpole genuinely loved him, seizing every opportunity to enjoy his society, and never doing anything for him; and Lord Chesterfield was amongst the most zealous trumpeters of his medical skill. Lively, sagacious, well-read, and brutally sarcastic, he had for a while a society reputation for wit scarcely inferior to Swift's; and he lived amongst men well able to judge of wit. Garrick and he were for many years intimate friends, until, in a contest of jokes, each of the two brilliant men lost his temper, and they parted like Roland and Sir Leoline--never to meet again. Garrick probably would have kept his temper under any other form of ridicule, but he never ceased to resent Monsey's reflection on his avarice to the Bishop of Sodor and Man. "Garrick is going to quit the stage," observed the Bishop. "That he'll never do," answered Monsey, making use of a Norfolk proverb, "so long as he knows a guinea is cross on one side and pile on the other." This speech was never forgiven. Lord Bath endeavoured to effect a reconciliation between the divided friends, but his amiable intention was of no avail. "I thank you," said Monsey; "but why will your Lordship trouble yourself with the squabbles of a Merry Andrew and quack doctor?"