intending, perhaps, to take some little poetical license with it afterwards. Abernethy, on the anecdote of the oysters and oyster-shells being duly substantiated, would have been _ostracized_ from polite society in those days of decorous etiquette, when, as medical men affected to be more _dientereumatic_ with the insides of their patients than any of us now pretend to be, they must needs have been far more affable when consulted on such cases than we of the present day might be; though they did not therefore always answer the same question in the same way; one, for instance, “Le médecin Tant Pis,” would frequently _proscribe_ the very things that his rival, “Le médecin Tant Mieux,” had just been recommending. When men came to find they must either give up some favourite article of food or else give up the anathema pronounced against it, they generally preferred the latter course, and were sure, to use a medical phrase, to “do well” if they did so; whilst a few wretched hypochondriacs, adopting the other alternative, and living strictly _en régime_, became only the more hypochondriacal for their pains. None but a determined theorist[66] would nowadays think of prescribing diet for the stomach of a single patient, far less for all those of a polygastric public; neither does an enlightened, self-educated public, that can read Liebig and thoroughly appreciate its own case, hold out much encouragement for such advice. The day is past without return for long-winded prose epic on indigestion; a livelier mode of dealing with the subject of _non-naturals_, in the shape of novels and romances, has won the public ear. Broussais’ five-act tragedy of ‘Gastro-Enteritis’[67] has received its last plaudits; already has Crabbe’s _euthanasia_ to this class of authors attained its full accomplishment:— “Ye tedious triflers, Truth’s destructive foes, Ye sons of Fiction clad in stupid prose, O’erweening teachers, who, yourselves in doubt, Light up false fires and send us far about, Long may the spider round your pages spin, Subtle and slow, her emblematic gin. Buried in dust and lost in silence dwell, Most potent, dull, and reverend friends, farewell!”