In the success that has in every century attended the rascally enterprises of pretenders to the art of medicine, is found a touching evidence of the sorrow, credulity, and ignorance of the generations that have passed, or are passing, to the silent home where the pain and joy, the simplicity and cunning, of this world are alike of insignificance. The hope that to the last lurks in the breast of the veriest wretch under heaven's canopy, whether his trials come from broken health, or an empty pocket, or wronged affection, speaks aloud in saddest tones, as one thinks of the multitudes who, worn with bodily malady and spiritual dejection, ignorant of the source of their sufferings, but thirsting for relief from them, have gone from charlatan to charlatan, giving hoarded money in exchange for charms, cramp-rings, warming-stones, elixirs, and trochees, warranted to cure every ill that flesh is heir to. The scene, from another point of view, is more droll, but scarcely less mournful. Look away for a few seconds from the throng of miserable objects who press round the empiric's stage; wipe out for a brief while the memory of their woes, and regard the style and arts of the practitioner who, with a trunk full of nostrums, bids disease to vanish, and death to retire from the scenes of his triumph. There he stands--a lean, fantastic man, voluble of tongue, empty-headed, full of loud words and menaces, prating about kings and princes who have taken him by the hand and kissed him in gratitude for his benefits showered upon them--dauntless, greedy, and so steeped in falsehood that his crazy-tainted brain half believes the lies that flow from his glib tongue. Are there no such men amongst us now--not standing on carts at the street-corners, and selling their wares to a dingy rabble, but having their seats of exchange in honoured places, and vending their prescriptions to crowds of wealthy clients?