Dr. Gooch I have a great respect for you. At the time when there was an intention of bringing a bill into Parliament for emancipating the Plague from the Quarantine Laws, and allowing to the people of Great Britain their long withheld right of having this disease as freely as the small pox, measles and any other infectious malady, you wrote a paper and published it in the Quarterly Review, against that insane intention; proving its insanity so fully by matter of fact, and so conclusively by force of reasoning, that your arguments carried conviction with them, and put an end, for the time, to that part of the emancipating and free trade system. Dr. Gooch, you have also written a volume of medical treatises of which I cannot speak more highly than by saying, sure I am that if the excellent subject of these my reminiscences were living, he would, for his admiration of those treatises have solicited the pleasure and honour of your acquaintance. Dr. Gooch, comply with this humble request of a sincere, though unknown admirer, for the sake of your departed brother-in-physic, who, like yourself, brought to the study of the healing art, a fertile mind, a searching intellect and a benevolent heart. More, Dr. G. I might say, and more I would say, but— Should I say more, you well might censure me (What yet I never was) a flatterer.[2] [Footnote 2: BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER.] When the King (God bless his Majesty!) shall peruse this book and be well-pleased therewith, if it should enter into his royal mind to call for his Librarian, and ask of him what honour and dignity hath been done to the author of it, for having delighted the heart of the King, and of so many of his liege subjects, and you shall have replied unto his Majesty, “there is nothing done for him;” then Dr. Gooch when the King shall take it into consideration how to testify his satisfaction with the book, and to manifest his bounty toward the author, you are requested to bear in mind my thoughts upon this weighty matter, of which I shall now proceed to put you in possession. Should he generously think of conferring upon me the honour of knighthood, or a baronetcy, or a peerage, (Lord Doncaster the title,) or a step in the peerage, according to my station in life, of which you Dr. Gooch can give him no information; or should he meditate the institution of an Order of Merit for men of letters, with an intention of nominating me among the original members, worthy as such intentions would be of his royal goodness, I should nevertheless, for reasons which it is not necessary to explain, deem it prudent to decline any of these honours.