which the author denies the ladies, if it has only the sanction of the doctor's ordonnance, jaunts of pleasure, balls, masquerades, &c. &c.; and so Lolotte, one of these ladies, on his unexpected arrival at their chateau de campagne, sings in raptures a chanson, of which the following is a stanza :

C'EST LE DOCTEUR.

"Chacun et l'acueille et l'admire;
L'époux même, le plus grondeur,
Et de la plus jalouse humeur,
Sans crainte, sans bruit, se retire;
Car sa femme vient de lui dire,
C'est le Docteur."

The doctor on some occasions makes hot love, and the whole ménage is completely under his direction. To wind up, the heroine of the piece takes his final prescription, and marries a handsome colonel, with whom she had contrived to have many a snug assignation under shelter of the doctor's recipe for change of air; and so a piece concludes which is without a rival in dulness, and of which the incidents

K

"Sieur Laporte previent les personnes qui voudrout bien lui faire l'honneur de l'employer, qu'il a réglé l'heure des consultations et visites, tant chez lui qu'à domicile, ainsi qu'il suit.

"Heures des consultations et visites, le matin chez lui, depuis 6 heures jusqu'à 11.

66

Depuis 2 heures de l'après midi jusqu'à 8. "N.B. On trouvera aussi chez le Sieur Laporte tous les medicamens nécessaires.

"Toutes les lettres être affranchies."

I have seen something very like this in the hall of an MD. at home, who no doubt would feel much affronted by any comparison with Doctor Laporte.

Speaking of Doctors, I went last night to the Théâtre de Madame. One of the pieces acted (for we had three) was called "Le Médecin des Dames ;" and is no bad piece of ridicule on the influence which the médecin commands over the affairs of men, when he makes his appeal through the predilections of the sex.

There is no flight of caprice too extravagant,

which the author denies the ladies, if it has only the sanction of the doctor's ordonnance;--jaunts of pleasure, balls, masquerades, &c. &c.; and so Lolotte, one of these ladies, on his unexpected arrival at their chateau de campagne, sings in raptures a chanson, of which the following is a stanza :—

The ductor OL SUTE LATEST HE

love, and the VIDE NEMO & comperey under

his directUL. TI VA

approach by far too near to sober reality to let us laugh. One of the many ladies under his spell calls him, "le Dorat de la Faculté, car il a toujours dans sa poche le Journal des Modes, et fait ses ordonnances en madrigaux."

Alas! we need not travel far to find a match for this gentleman in our own honest land. It is humiliating to a profession which deserves to be respectable to name it, but I literally remember an M.D., in a good deal of business, fraught with one of the (ci-devant) "Scotch licenses to slay," who used to pay a certain number of hebdomadal visits, to perform the express service of catering gossip and mending the pens of a female patient; and she was amazingly taken with him. But why should we be surprised at this or any thing else of the kind, when we see the profession so very frequently in the hands of the ignorant; and that any man who chooses to practise en docteur, gets credit for skill only because he has stood a certain number of years behind a counter, or trod the wards of an hospital? The doctor, when speaking of his triplicate function, styles

himself a general practitioner; and the general's course, I believe to be, too generally as follows. His first matriculation commences at the Galen's head, with little better preparation than a grocer's apprentice; and there he is doomed and indentured to remain for a certain number of years, pulverizing and extracting. Now, whatever he may claim for extraction, it will surely not be contended that such a place is just the most retired for abstraction. At least his snatches of opportunity for study, stolen from officinal hours and duties, cannot be very numerous; and allowing that he is ever so eager for scaling the heights of science, who is to direct his studies? His master must, like all other men, be liable to consult his own interest in preference to his apprentice's accomplishments, and to look for some more substantial return for his services, than the furniture of his brain, which is of so much less use to him than the produce of his hands: or, allowing that brain could not be entirely dispensed with, the work of his hands at least "brings most grist to the mill." As the