A few years of hard reading, constant attention in the chambers of the
conveyancer, the equity craftsman, the pleader, and a few years more of
that disinterested observance of the practice of the courts, which is
liberally afforded to every young barrister, and indeed which many enjoy
throughout life, and he is competent, with moderate talent, to protect
the interests of his client, and with moderate mental labour to make a
respectable figure in his profession. In like manner, four or five years
sedulous attendance on lectures, dissections, and practice of the
hospitals, enables your physician to see how little remedial power
exists in his boasted art; knowing this, he feels pulses, and orders a
recognized routine of draughts and pills with the formality which makes
the great secret of his profession. When the patient dies, nature, of
course, bears the blame; and when nature, happily uninterfered with,
recovers his patient, the doctor stands on tiptoe. Henceforward his
success is determined by other than medical sciences: a pillbox and
pair, a good house in some recognized locality, Sunday dinners, a bit of
a book, grand power of head-shaking, shoulder-shrugging, bamboozling
weak-minded men and women, and, if possible, a religious connexion.
For the clergyman, it is only necessary that he should be orthodox,
humble, and pious; that he should on no occasion, right or wrong, set
himself in opposition to his ecclesiastical superiors; that he should
preach unpretending sermons; that he should never make jokes, nor
understand the jokes of another: this is all that he wants to get on
respectably. If he is ambitious, and wishes one of the great prizes, he
must have been a free-thinking reviewer, have written pamphlets, or made
a fuss about the Greek particle, or, what will avail him more than all,
have been tutor to a minister of state.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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