Certain professional peculiarities might have
favoured the supposition. His mode of practice was exactly that
popularly attributed to old women. He delighted in innocent
remedies--manna, magnesia, and camphor julep; never put on a
blister in his life; and would sooner, from pure complaisance,
let a patient die, than administer an unpalatable prescription.
So qualified, to say nothing of his gifts in tea-drinking, cassino,
and quadrille (whist was too many for him), his popularity could not
be questioned. When he expired, all Hazelby mourned. The lamentation
was general. The women of every degree (to borrow a phrase from that
great phrase-monger, Horace Walpole) "cried quarts;" and the procession
to the churchyard--that very churchyard to which he had himself attended
so many of his patients--was now followed by all of them that remained
alive.
It was felt that the successor of Mr. Simon Saunders would have many
difficulties to encounter. My friend, John Hallett, "came, and saw, and
overcame." John was what is usually called a rough diamond. Imagine a
short, clumsy, stout-built figure, almost as broad as it is long,
crowned by a bullet head, covered with shaggy brown hair, sticking out
in every direction; the face round and solid, with a complexion originally
fair, but dyed one red by exposure to all sorts of weather; open
good-humoured eyes, of a greenish cast, his admirers called them hazel;
a wide mouth, full of large white teeth; a cocked-up nose, and a double
chin; bearing altogether a strong resemblance to a print which I once
saw hanging up in an alehouse parlour, of "the celebrated divine (to use
the identical words of the legend) Dr.
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