says so? Neither reason nor Scripture. Inspired authors have done
otherwise, and reason and common sense tell me that, if the characters
of past ages and men are to be drawn at all, they are to be drawn like
themselves, that is, with their excellences and their foibles; and it
as much a piece of justice to the world, and to virtue, too, to do the
one as the other. The ruling passion, _et les égarements du coeur_,
are the very things which mark and distinguish a man's character,
in which I would as soon leave out a man's head as his hobby-horse.
However, if, like the poor devil of a painter, we must conform to the
pious canon, 'De mortuis,' &c., which I own has a spice of piety in
the _sound_ of it, and be obliged to paint both our angels and our
devils out of the same pot, I then infer that our Sydenhams and our
Sangrados, our Lucretias and our Messalinas, our Somersets and our
Bolingbrokes, are alike entitled to statues, and all the historians or
satirists who have said otherwise since they departed this life,
from Sallust to S----e, are guilty of the crimes you charge me with,
'cowardice and injustice.' But why cowardice? 'Because 'tis not
courage to attack a dead man who can't defend himself.' But why do you
doctors attack such a one with your incision knife? Oh! for the good
of the living. 'Tis my plea."

And, having given this humorous twist to his argument, he glides off
into extenuatory matter. He had not even, he protests, made as much as
a surgical incision into his victim (Dr. Richard Mead, the friend of
Bentley and of Newton, and a physician and physiologist of high repute
in his day); he had but just scratched him, and that scarce skin-deep.
As to the "droll foible" of Dr. Mead, which he had made merry with,
"it was not first reported (even to the few who can understand the
hint) by me, but known before by every chambermaid and footman within
the bills of mortality"--a somewhat daring assertion, one would