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to some shop, in which they barricaded themselves against the maréchaussée. Many of these disgraceful acts went unpunished. Sometimes the Faculty would despatch an official to claim the body; he was always sent about his business; and then recourse was had to law. The report of an unfortunate huissier, who was actor and victim in one of these scenes, may be seen in a procès-verbal of the time. He was sent to seize a body which had been taken to St. Cosmas's. There he found three professors (in cap and gown!) giving an anatomical demonstration to a large audience. He was received with yells, and cruelly beaten. A force coming to his rescue, the students cut up the corpse into bits rather than let the Faculty get it.

A common interest and a common hatred of their domineering antagonist ended by drawing together the two inferior orders, and finally led to their reunion. The increasing number of the barbers, unrestrained by any rule, and unrestrainable by any law, threatened to swamp surgery altogether; and so the men of letters made up their minds to extend the hand of fellowship to the artisans, and receive them back, not as slaves any longer, but as brethren. In 1655 the surgeons swallowed this bitter pill; they took upon themselves the shame of uniting with the barbers, and the barbers entered on the privileges of the surgeons. Parliament ratified the contract, and the Faculty was scarcely named in the affair. It was left stranded. Its servants, whom it had raised from the dust to do its work and fight its battles, had betrayed it and gone off with arms and baggage to the enemy's camp. But it was not long without perceiving that it might draw profit from what seemed a discomfiture. The surgeons had conferred their privileges on the barbers; in return they had, of course, accepted the liabilities of their new associates. Now the barbers were bound by contract to an oath of fidelity, and other obligations of a pecuniary nature, to the Faculty. This body accordingly claimed either that the union. effected should be dissolved, or that both companies should be subject to the engagements by which the barbers had bound themselves. It renewed at the same time all its former claims of supremacy, and its old prohibitions against teaching and conferring degrees, but, above all, against the assumption of the cap and gown.

Three years did this process last, which occupies a voluminous place in the Parliamentary registers. The surgeons eventually lost their cause; and that which did not a little contribute thereto was the manifestation of their own miserable internal dissensions. "St. Luke has been stronger than St. Cosmas !" exclaimed the triumphant Guy Patin at the news of this great victory. Seventy

two doctors went in procession, in grand costume, to thank the President, Lamoignon, and the Avocat-général, Talon; and, in order to testify their special gratitude to the latter, it was decreed that, having well merited of the Faculty, he and his family should be attended gratis in perpetuity. A magnificent edition of Hippocrates in five folio volumes was presented along with this decree, enclosed in a silver box. For several days not one of the crestfallen surgeons was to be seen in the streets, and six of their number, it is said, fell sick. Gladly would they now have dissolved the unhappy mésalliance they had contracted, but it was too late. Both barbers and surgeons, indeed, alike felt that the defeat was final; but on the latter it must have fallen with the most crushing severity. Before the close of the year the chair in which Ambroise Paré had sat the symbol of departed greatness-was removed. They had to pay the impost, take the oath of fidelity—no humiliation was spared them. Thus forced into a preposterous alliance, which was made the pretext for its degradation, the surgical profession languished for many years. The Faculty on this occasion certainly committed its worst fault. For paltry questions of precedence it retarded for a century the progress of surgery, which did not emerge from the inferior position to which the decree of 1660 had reduced it, until time and necessity led to a reconstitution of surgery and shaving as two distinct professions. It was then that Louis XV., at the instance of La Peyronie, created the Royal Academy of Surgery, which furnished so many illustrious names to science in the eighteenth century, and which would doubtless have extinguished the old Faculty, if the Revolution had not saved it the trouble by destroying them. both.

Our space forbids us to notice the other great battle of the Faculty during the period which has immediately fallen under our consideration that which it waged and won against the Montpellier doctors. But the Montpellier school would deserve a notice by itself; and the interest which gathers round it has been heightened by the important questions, physiological and philosophical, connected with its name in the present day.

A word or two more, and we have done. When Molière was about to deal the Faculty its most grievous wound, it was triumphant on all sides. Yet, as a system, it was already doomed to that destruction which had fallen on the whole scholastic method in science prevailing in the Middle Ages. Hippocrates, it is true, furnished the text-book of medicine; but it was Hippocrates virtually commented by Aristotle, as all the old medical phraseology and medical argumentations abundantly prove. Much of the ridicule attached to

that venerable body against which Molière has raised an inextinguishable laugh had its origin in the retention of this language with all the quiddities of the schools, and of those curious dialectic exercises which formed the approved method of mental gymnastics in the Middle Ages long after they had been discarded every where else. The rest of the ridicule which falls to the due share of the Faculty must be laid to the account of the selfishness, pride, and egotism inherent in human nature, but which always strike us more forcibly when exhibited in a state of things foreign to current ideas and manners.

In conclusion, we would point out what we conceive may be esteemed as a sound point in the system of that day,-its treatment of man as a whole. There is no divorce with these old doctors between body and soul. Modern medical science has affected to treat the body apart from any regard to the spiritual portion of man's nature. While allowing the immense progress made in medicine and surgery in modern times, we cannot but feel that a serious error was committed in dividing what our fathers deemed inseparable. The materialistic errors of the eighteenth century, and, in particular, the materialism so prevalent in the learned medical body, are a standing comment on the systems which made clear decks of those fundamental principles which had come down to us from the earliest antiquity, and which had received the sanction of the Christian schools, in whose teaching physiology and psychology were always closely united; the study of the soul crowning that of physiology. We witness with satisfaction a strong reaction amongst many members of the French medical body towards views which harmonise thoroughly with the old doctrine of the Angel of the School, laid down long before those modern discoveries which are beginning slowly to lead men back, not to the pedantry of the olden time, but to those ancient paths from which our fathers would have deemed it heresy to wander.

Essays on the Poets.

I. HENRY TAYLOR.

THE present century has been a great age of English poetry-greater unquestionably than any which preceded it, except the Elizabethan. But there is one great difference between the Elizabethan poetry and that of the nineteenth century. Our poets of the sixteenth century in the main bore to each other a considerable resemblance,―not in detail, but in spirit. The English poetry of the nineteenth century, on the other hand, has unconsciously divided itself into different schools, as remote from each other as were those of Italian painting. In Wordsworth and Coleridge we have the school of philosophic thought, united with a mystical reverence for nature. In Shelley, Keats, and Landor we find the classical or Hellenic school, with its sharpness of outline, its love of definite and finite beauty, its appreciation of nature rather through the sensations than the intellect, and its habit of interpreting nature through sensuous types and mythological fancies. In Leigh Hunt and Thomas Hood English poetry wears an Italian grace and gaiety of aspect; while in the Pleasures of Memory and the Pleasures of Hope we have the last echoes of the French, or pseudo-classical school, transmitted from Goldsmith and Pope. In Crabbe we find the school of dry and hard reality, the dusty idyl of common English life,-externally, prosaic enough, yet with poetry at its centre, like the spark latent in the flint. The romantic and chivalrous tales of Scott were a revival of the old English ballad-poetry, with a larger development but a less fine handling and a less vivid inspiration. In Byron and Moore we have the poetry of passion, or, more correctly speaking, of emotional excitement; combined in the former instance with great energy of an imagination rather rhetorical than comprehensive or penetrating, and in the latter with great brilliancy and affluence of fancy, but with little refinement.

In our own day there have risen among us several new poets, the most celebrated of whom are unquestionably Mr. Tennyson and Mr. Henry Taylor. The poetry of the latter has now been presented to us in what is called a "complete edition;"* and though we trust that it is not yet literally complete, enough of it is now before us

* The Poetical Works of Henry Taylor. 3 vols. Chapman and Hall, 1864.

to allow of a comparison between his several works, and a comprehensive estimate of them than we could have made when each of them successively appeared. We have not space to notice them all, and shall here confine ourselves to the principal one, Philip van Artevelde.

One of the most remarkable circumstances connected with Mr. Taylor's poetry is the small degree in which it can be classed with the schools above named. Like the first that we have referred to, it is thoughtful in an unusual degree; but its thoughtfulness is never abstract or metaphysical, still less mystical. In moral gravity it has some affinity with Southey's poetry; in scholarly and periodic construction of sentences, with Shelley's; in precision of form and compactness of diction, with Landor's. But in the case of these poets the resemblance to Mr. Taylor is far less than the dissimilitude; while with most of the other poets we have named he stands in striking contrast. There exists, it is true, one characteristic in common between the authors of Childe Harold and of Philip van Artevelde in each case there is a strongly-marked ideal of human character, with which the author is plainly in sympathy, and with which he has a singular power of making us sympathise. The two ideals have also, with all their antagonism, thus much in common,-that they both eminently belong to the sphere of the natural man, and have few relations with the spiritual. But in all else they are absolutely opposed to each other. Lord Byron's ideal is that of a man mastered by his passions, or impelled mainly by his wrongs; one whose strength, like that of a projectile, is not a strength inherent in him, but one to which he is subjected. The ideal exhibited in Philip van Artevelde, while equally of this world, is a nobler conception. It is that of one whose passions are under the control of the intellect and moral will, however little these last are themselves ruled by a supernatural principle. But here the analogy ends. Lord Byron constantly delineates the same ideal in his various works; a proof that, despite the great ability of his dramas, his genius was not dramatic. Mr. Taylor's ideal may be found adumbrated in Isaac Comnenus, his earliest drama, while it is completely delineated in Philip van Artevelde; but in the latter work, and still more in his two later dramas, characters cast in the most different moulds are illustrated with no less vigour. His union of vigour with classic grace is his chief characteristic.

Mr. Taylor's poetry is preeminently that of action, as Lord Byron's is that of passion; or rather it includes action as well as passion, thus corresponding with Milton's definition of tragic poetry as "high actions and high passions best describing." It is this peculiarity

VOL. III.

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