In some respects, however, this is, I think, a less vulgar age than that of my youth. Vulgar exclusiveness on grounds essentially illiberal was far more common. It will perhaps seem hardly credible at the present day that middle-class professional society, such as that of barristers, physicians, rectors, and vicars, should sixty years ago have deemed attorneys and general medical practitioners (or apothecaries, as the usual, and somewhat depreciatory term was) inadmissible to social equality. But such was the case. My reminiscences of half a century or more ago seem to indicate also that professional etiquette has been relaxed in various other particulars. I hear of physicians being in partnership with others of the same profession--an arrangement which has a commercial savour in it that would have been thought quite _infra dig._ in my younger day. I hear also of their accepting, if not perhaps exacting, payments of a smaller amount than the traditional guinea. This was unheard of in the old days. An English physician is a member of the most generously liberal profession that exists or ever existed on earth. And it was an every-day occurrence for a physician to think more of the purse of his patient than of the value of his own services. But he did this either by refusing to accept any fee whatever, or by declining it on the occasion of subsequent visits: never by diminishing the amount of it. In some other cases professional dignity had to be maintained under circumstances that entailed considerable sacrifices on those who were called upon to maintain it. It was not etiquette, for instance, for a barrister going on circuit to travel otherwise than by a private conveyance. He might hire a post chaise, or he might ride his own horse, or even a hired one, but he must not travel by a stage coach, or put up at an hotel. I have heard it said that this rule originated in the notion that a barrister travelling to an assize town by the public coach might fall in with some attorney bound on a similar errand, and might so be led, if not into the sin, at least into temptation to the sin of “huggery.” I dare say many a young barrister of the present day does not know what huggery means or meant!