MISCELLANEOUS.

Nelson Examiner and New Zealand Chronicle, Volume IV, Issue 163, 19 April 1845, Page 28

MISCELLANEOUS.

Gentility-mongers. — These persons are endeavouring to " make a connexion." as the phrase is, by which they may gain advancement in their professions, and are continually on the look-out for introductions to persons of quality, their hangers-on, and dependents. There is too much of this sort of thing among medical men in London, the family nature of whose profession renders connexion, private partiality, and personal favour, more essential to them than to others. The lawyer, for example, need not be a gentility-monger; he has only to get round attorneys, for the opportunity to show what he can do ; when he has done this, in which a little toadying "on the sly " is necessary — all the rest is easy. The court and the public are his judges; his powers are at once appreciable; his talent can be calculated, like the money in his pocket; he can now go on straightforward, without valuing the individual preference or aversion of any body. But a profession where men make way through the whisperings of women, and an inexhaustible variety of sotto voce contrivances, must needs have a tendency to create a subserviency of spirit and of manner, which naturally directs itsftf into gentilitymongering: where realities, such as medical experience, reading, and skill, are remotely or not all appreciable, we must take up with appearances ; and of all appearances, the appearance of proximity to people of fashion is the most taking and seductive to people not of fashion. It is for this reason that a rising physician, if he happen to have a lord upon his sick or visiting list, never has done telling his plebeian patients the particulars of his noble case, which they swallow like almond milk, finding it an excellent placebo. As it is the interest of a gentility-monger, and his constant practice, to be attended by a fashionable physician, in order that he may be enabled continually to talk of what Sir Henry thinks of this, and how Sir Henry objects to that, and the opinion of Sir Henry upon t'other, so it is the business of the struggling doctor to be a gen-tility-monger, with the better chance of becoming one day or other a fashionable physician. Acting on this principle, the poor man must necessarily nave a house in a professional neighbourhood, which usually abuts upon a neighbourhood fashionable or exclusive; he must hire a carriage by the month, and be for ever stepping in and out of it, at his own door, keeping it purposely bespattered with mud, to show the extent of his visiting acquaintance ; he must give dinners to people " who may be useful," and be continually on the look-out for those lucky accidents which have made the fortunes, and, as a matter of course, the merit of so many professional men. He becomes a Fellow of the Royal Society, which gives him the chance of conversing with a lord, and the right of entering a lord's (the president's) house, which is turned into sandwich-shop four times a year for his reception ; this being the nearest approach he makes to acquaintance with great personages, he values with the importance it deserves. His servants, with famine legibly written on their brows, are assiduous and civil; his wife, though half-starved, is very genteel, and at her dinner parties burns candle-ends from the palace. If you pay her a morning visit, you will have some such conversation as follows : — " Pray, Mr. , is there any news to-day ?" " Great distress, I understand, throughout the country." " Indeed — the old story, shocking — very. Pray, have you heard the delightful news ? The Prin-cess-Royal has actually cut a tooth !'* " Indeed ?" "Yes, I assure you; and the sweet little royal love of a martyr has borne it like a hero." "Positively?" "Positively, I assure you ; Dr. Tryiton has just returned from a consultation with his friend Sir Henry, upon a particular difficult case — Lord Scruffskin — case of elephantiasis I think they call it, and tells me that Sir Henry has arrived express from Windsor with the news." " Indeed !" "Do you think, Mr. , there will be a general illumination ?" " Really, madam, I cannot say." " There ought to be (with emphasis). You must know, Mr. , Dr. Tryiton has forwarded to a high quarter a beautifully bound copy of his work on ulcerated sore throats ; he says there is a great analogy between ulcers of the throat and den — den — den — something, I don't know what — teething, in short. If nothing comes of it, Dr. Tryiton, thank Heaven, can do without it; but you know, Mr. , it may, on a future occasion, be useful to our family." If there is, in the great world of London, one thing more spiritsinking than another, it is to see men condemned, by the necessities of an over-crowded profession, to sink to meannesses of pretension for a desperate accident by which they may insure success. When one has had an opportunity of being behind the scenes, and knowing what petty shifts, what poor expedients of living, what anxiety of mind, are at the bottom of all this empty show, one will no longer marvel that many born for better things should sink under the difficulties of their position, or that the newspapers so continually set forth the miserably unprovided for condition in which they so often are compelled to leave their families. — Blackwood's Magazine. The Landowners and Railways. — It was given in evidence before the Select Committee, that no less a sum than £8,500,000 lias been expended by railway companies in England and Scotland, on land and "compensation." This is about an average of £5,000 a mile. On the Paris and Rouen Railway, the item was £2,300 a mile. The average in Belgium in £2,750 a mile. — Railway Record.

The Earl of Dude, " the farmers' enemy," as the monopolists designate htm, carried off four Bilvermedalß, besides more substantial rewards, for the best agricultural machines exhibited at the Southampton meeting of the Royal Agricultural Society last year.