A man of such connections could not fail to gain almost as much practice as he liked. His visits to Spa for four successive years, after the London season, strengthened his professional prospects, and his fourth year’s practice brought him over £1200. In a few years he was able to resolve that his professional income should never exceed £5000, and that he would give to study, recreation, or travel all his surplus time. Thus happily placed, Henry Holland became the friend of every man of note, the patron of science at the Royal Institution, of which he was long president—but not the hospital physician, the clinical teacher, the original writer, the promoter of medical reform, or the habitué of the medical societies. He dined out, and never reproved his patients for the lapses from physiological prudence which he observed at the table. The “frequent half hour of genial conversation” was what he bestowed and was most capable of bestowing on his patients. Perhaps he thereby solaced their days of tedium or hypochondria as well as others who might have sought to root up their habits or impart tone to their minds with more ruthless energy. “When Lady Palmerston was suffering from an illness that occasioned some alarm to her friends,” said the _Times_, in its obituary notice of Holland, “one of them, meeting the late Dr. Fergusson, asked anxiously how she was. ‘I can’t give you a better notion of her recovery,’ was the reply, ‘than by telling you that I have just received my last fee, and that she is now left entirely to Holland.’” On this being repeated to Lord Palmerston his lordship mused a little, and then said, “Ah! I see what he means. When you trust yourself to Holland, you should have a superfluous stock of health for him to work upon.” Holland himself had this superfluous stock of health. When over eighty he writes: “A frequent source of amusement to myself is my incapacity for walking slowly; and the sort of compulsion I even now feel to pass those immediately before me in the street, and to take the diagonal instead of the two sides of a square, whenever this is the alternative. When I cease to take the diagonal (often a dirty one) instead of the side pavements, I shall consider that I have gone a step downwards in the path of life.” His excursions were almost all taken alone; but he evidently seldom put himself out of the reach of general society, as good as the neighbourhood afforded. He was no recluse, yet apparently not a man of a few warm strong personal friendships. If he was we find no record of it. From his utter reticence about his medical contemporaries, we should judge that he did not at bottom appreciate them as they deserved.