Soon the leading apothecaries began to prescribe on their own responsibility, without the countenance of a member of the College. If they were threatened with censure or other punishment by a regular physician, they retorted by discontinuing to call him in to consultations. Jealousies soon sprang up. Starving graduates, with the diplomas of Oxford and Cambridge and the certificates of the College in their pockets, were embittered by having to trudge the pavements of London, and see the mean medicine-mixers (who had scarce scholarship enough to construe a Latin bill) dashing by in their carriages. Ere long the heartburnings broke out in a paper warfare, as rancorous and disreputable as any squabble embalmed in literature. The scholars called the rich tradesmen thieves, swindlers, and unlettered blockheads. The rich tradesmen taunted the scholars with discontent, falsehood, and ignorance of everything except Latin and Greek. Pope took the side of the physicians. Like Johnson, Parr, and all men of enlightenment and sound scholarship, he had a high opinion of the Faculty. It is indeed told of him, on questionable authority, that on his death-bed, when he heard the bickerings of Dr. Burton and Dr. Thompson, each accusing the other of maltreating his patient, he levelled with his last breath an epigram at the two rivals-- "Dunces, rejoice, forgive all censures past-- The greatest dunce has killed your foe at last." To Dr. Arbuthnot he wrote-- "Friend to my life, which did not you prolong, The world had wanted many an idle song." His feeble health, making his life a long disease, never allowed him vigour and confidence enough to display ingratitude to the Faculty, and illustrate the truth of the lines-- "God and the doctor we alike adore, But only when in danger, not before; The danger o'er, both are alike requited, God is forgotten, and the doctor slighted." His habitual tone, when speaking of the medical profession, was that of warm admiration and affection. In the "Imitations of Horace" he says-- "Weak though I am of limb, and short of sight, Far from a lynx, and not a giant quite, I'll do what Mead and Cheselden advise, To keep these limbs, and to preserve these eyes." It is true that he elsewhere ridicules Mead's fondness for rare books and Sloane's passion for butterflies; but at the close of his days he wrote in a confidential letter to a friend of the Faculty, "They are in general the most amiable companions and the best friends, as well as the most learned men I know." In the protracted dissensions between the physicians and the apothecaries Pope was a cordial supporter of the former. When he accused, in the "Essay on Criticism," the penny-a-lining critics of acquiring their slender knowledge of the poetic art from the poets they assailed, he compared them to apothecaries whose scientific information was pilfered from the prescriptions they were required to dispense.