But this will not account for the literary talent of the doctors. For they write books in England and Scotland, in France and temperate Germany, in every latitude and _with_ a good deal; they are, however, defective in longitude, which is remarkable, when we consider how they will protract their cases. With their pens they are prompt, clean, humane in the matter of ink, their first intention almost always successful, their thought expelled by natural cerebral contraction without stimulus, (we speak of ergot, but of "old rye" we know nothing,) their passion running to its crisis in the minimum of time, and their affections altogether pleasanter than anything of the kind they accuse us of having, as well as less lingering. But with their pills--well, we all know how our ills are nursed by medicine. Is it a relief that their precept is less tedious than their practice? It is good policy for us, perhaps, if our minds are to be under treatment from their books,--and it grows plainer every day that no person of mind can well escape from them,--that our bodies should continue subject to their boluses. Thus we may die daily, but our incorporeal part is better acclimated in the invisible world of truths and realities. No,--the doctors owe nothing to climate or race. The intelligent ones are everywhere broad, acute, tender, and religious. They uniformly see what is natural and what is morbid, what is fact and what is fancy, what is cutaneous and what is vital, in men and women. They stand on unreal, conventional terms with nothing. They know healthy from inflamed tissues, and run down, grab, and give one dexterous fatal shake to a tissue of lies. One of Dr. Brown's terriers is not more swift, exact, and uncompromising after vermin. This excellent sense for unvarnished realities has been attributed by some to their habit of visiting so many interiors--of men and of their houses--whose swell-fronts are pervious to the sincerity of pain. We never see a doctor's chaise anchored at a door but we imagine the doctor taking in freight up-stairs. In these days he is beginning to receive more than he gives. Let no sarcastic person allude to doctors' fees. We mean that the physician, whose humanity and intelligence are broad diplomas, on presenting which the doors of hearts and houses open with a welcome, enters into the choicest field of his education and research, where his tender observation walks the wards of thought, feeling, and motive, to amass the facts of health and suffering, to be refined at the true drama of pathos, to be ennobled by the spectacle of fair and lofty spiritual traits, to be advised of the weaknesses which he learns to touch lightly with his caustic, while his knowing and friendly look deprecates all excess of pain. It is a school of shrewdness, gentleness, and faith.