The Doctor, who was charitable in all his opinions, used to account and apologize for many of the errors of men, by what he called the original sin of their constitution, using the term not theologically, but in a physico-philosophical sense. What an old French physician said concerning Charles VIII. was in entire accord with his speculations,—_ce corps etoit composé de mauvais pâte, et de matiere cathareuse._ Men of hard hearts and heavy intellect, he said, were made of stony materials. For a drunkard, his qualifying censure was,—“poor fellow! bibulous clay—bibulous clay!” Your light-brained, light-hearted people, who are too giddy ever to be good, had not earth enough, he said, in their composition. Those upon whose ungrateful temper benefits were ill bestowed, and on whom the blessings of fortune were thrown away, he excused by saying that they were made from a sandy soil;—and for Mammon's muckworms,—their mould was taken from the dunghill. Mason the poet was a man of ill-natured politics, out of humour with his country till the French Revolution startled him and brought him into a better state of feeling. This however was not while the Doctor lived, and till that time he could see nothing but tyranny and injustice in the proceedings of the British Government, and nothing but slavery and ruin to come for the nation. These opinions were the effects of Whiggery[1] acting upon a sour stomach and a saturnine constitution. To think ill of the present and augur worse of the future has long been accounted a proof of patriotism among those who by an illustrious antiphrasis call themselves patriots. “What the Romans scorned to do after the battle of Cannæ,” said Lord Keeper Finch in one of his solid and eloquent speeches, “what the Venetians never did when they had lost all their _terra firma_, that men are now taught to think a virtue and the sign of a wise and good man, _desperare de Republica_: and all this in a time of as much justice and peace at home, as good laws for the security of religion and liberty, as good execution of these laws, as great plenty of trade and commerce abroad, and as likely a conjuncture of affairs for the continuance of these blessings to us, as ever nation prospered under.” [Footnote 1: See Vol. IV. p. 375.] The Doctor, when he spoke of this part of Mason's character, explained it by saying that the elements had not been happily tempered in him—“cold and dry, Sir!” and then he shook his head and knit his brow with that sort of compassionate look which came naturally into his countenance when he was questioned concerning a patient whose state was unfavourable.