Da Vinci owed his success as a portrait painter to his knowledge of anatomy and physiology derived from study under a physician, as also did Michael Angelo. How would our Powers have succeeded as a sculptor, without this knowledge, or Miss Bonheur as a painter of animals? Dr. Hunter says "Vinci (L.) was at the time the best anatomist in the world." Crabbe, to be sure, failed as a physician, but succeeded as a literary man; but then Crabbe was no physician, and was unread in medicine and surgery. Arbuthnot also failed in the same manner, and for the same cause. All who have so failed may attribute it to the fact they _did not succeed in what they were not, but did succeed in what they were_--as Oliver Goldsmith. He squandered at the gaming table the money given him by his kind uncle to get him through Trinity College, and though spending two years afterwards in Edinburgh, and passing one year at Leyden, ostensibly reading medicine, he totally failed to pass an examination before the surgeons of the college at London, and was rejected "as being insufficiently informed." He had previously been writing for the unappreciative booksellers, and authorship now became, per force, his only means of livelihood. Goldsmith was an excellent, kind-hearted man; and if he had only got married and had a good wife to develop him, he would have been a greater man than he was. It has been intimated in these pages that Shakspeare was prejudiced against medicine,--throwing "physic to the dogs;" but it is evident from a careful perusal of his works that Shakspeare was ignorant, and also superstitious, as respects this much abused science. Of the superstitions we need not further treat, but refer the intelligent reader to any of his plays for the truth of our intimation. In Act II., Scene 1, of Coriolanus, he says by Menenius Agrippa, the friend of Coriolanus, "It gives me an estate of seven years' health, in which time I will make a lip at the physician; the most sovereign prescription of Galen is but empirical," etc. Coriolanus was banished from Rome, and died in the fifth century before Christ (about 490), and Galen was not born till six hundred years afterwards, viz.,--A. D. 130. We should smile to see the Apollo Belvedere with "glasses on his nose,"--as many of our young ape-ollos now wear for _effect_; but it would scarcely be less ridiculous than Gloster saying in Lear, "I shall not want spectacles." King Lyr reigned during the earliest period of the Anglo-Saxon history, and spectacles were not introduced into England until the beginning of the fourteenth century. It is said that the painter Cigoli in his representation of the aged Simeon at the circumcision of Christ, made this same error by placing spectacles on the patriarch's nose.