Yet, taking them all in all, the military ‘cut up’ better than any other professionals. The doctors might be agreeable; they know a vast deal of life, and in a way too that other people never see it; but meet them _en masse_, they are little better than body-snatchers. There is not a malady too dreadful, nor an operation too bloody, to tell you over your soup; every slice of the turkey suggests an amputation, and they sever a wing with the anatomical precision they would extirpate a thigh bone. Life to them has no interest except where it verges on death; and from habit and hardening, they forget that human suffering has any other phase than a source of wealth to the medical profession. The lawyers are even worse. To listen to them, you would suppose that the highest order of intellect was a skill in chicanery; that trick and stratagem were the foremost walks of talent; that to browbeat a poor man and to confound a simple one were great triumphs of genius; and that the fairest gift of the human mind was that which enabled a man to feign every emotion of charity, benevolence, pity, anger, grief, and joy, for the sum of twenty pounds sterling, wrung from abject poverty and briefed by an ‘honest attorney.’ As to the parsons, I must acquit them honestly of any portion of this charge. It has been my fortune to ‘assist’ at more than one visitation dinner, and I can safely aver that never by any accident did the conversation become professional, nor did I hear a word of piety during the entertainment. Country gentlemen are scarcely professional, however the similarity of their tastes and occupations might seem to warrant the classification-- fox-hunting, grouse-shooting, game-preserving, road-jobbing, rent- extracting, land-tilling, being propensities in common. They are the slowest of all; and the odds are long against any one keeping awake after the conversation has taken its steady turn into shorthorns, Swedish turnips, subsoiling, and southdowns. Artists are occasionally well enough, if only for their vanity and self- conceit. Authors are better still, for ditto and ditto. Actors are most amusing from the innocent delusion they labour under that all that goes on in life is unreal, except what takes place in Covent Garden or Drury Lane. In a word, professional cliques are usually detestable, the individuals who compose them being frequently admirable ingredients, but intolerable when unmixed; and society, like a _macédoine_, is never so good as when its details are a little incongruous.