If an hospital could speak it could tell strange tales--of misery slowly wrought, ambition foiled, and fair promise ending in shame. Many a toilworn veteran has entered the wards of St. Bartholomew's to die in the very couch by the side of which in his youth he daily passed--a careless student, joyous with the spring of life, and little thinking of the storm and unkind winds rising up behind the smiles of the nearer future. Scholars of gentle birth, brave soldiers of proud lineage, patient women whose girlhood, spent in luxury and refinement, has been followed by penury, evil entreatment, and destitution, find their way to our hospitals--to pass from a world of grief to one where sorrow is not. It is not once in awhile, but daily, that a physician of any large charitable institution of London reads a pathetic tale of struggle and defeat, of honest effort and bitter failure, of slow descent from grade to grade of misfortune--in the tranquil dignity, the mild enduring quiet, and noiseless gratitude of poor sufferers--gentle once in fortune, gentle still in nature. One hears unpleasant stories of medical students, their gross dissipations and coarse manners. Possibly these stories have their foundation in fact, but at best they are broad and unjust caricatures. This writer in his youth lived much amongst the students of our hospitals, as he did also amongst those of our old universities, and he found them simple and manly in their lives, zealous in the pursuit of knowledge, animated by _a professional esprit_ of the best sort, earnestly believing in the dignity of their calling, and characterised by a singular ever-lively compassion for all classes of the desolate and distressed. And this quality of mercy, which unquestionably adorns in an eminent degree the youth of our medical schools, he has always regarded as a happy consequence of their education, making them acquainted, in the most practical and affecting manner, with the sad vicissitudes of human existence.