A Book about Doctors Part 21

The Chevalier had a son and a biographer in the person of John Taylor, who, under the t.i.tle of "John Taylor, Junior," succeeded to his father's trumpet, and blew it with good effect. The t.i.tle-page of his biography of his father enumerates some half-hundred crowned or royal heads, to whose eyes the "Chevalier John Taylor, Opthalmiater Pontifical, Imperial, and Royal," administered.

But this work was feeble and contemptible compared with the Chevalier's autobiographic sketch of himself, in his proposal for publishing which he speaks of his loves and adventures, in the following modest style:--

"I had the happiness to be also personally known to two of the most amiable ladies this age has produced--namely, Lady Inverness and Lady Mackintosh; both powerful figures, of great abilities, and of the most pleasing address--both the sweetest prattlers, the prettiest reasoners, and the best judges of the charms of high life that I ever saw. When I first beheld these wonders I gazed on their beauties, and my attention was busied in admiring the order and delicacy of their discourse, &c. For were I commanded to seek the world for a lady adorned with every accomplishment that man thinks desirable in the s.e.x, I could only be determined by finding their resemblance....

"I am perfectly acquainted with the history of Persia, as well before as since the death of Thamas Kouli Khan; well informed of the adventures of Prince Heraclius; was personally known to a minister he sent to Moscow in his first attempt to conquer that country; and am instructed in the cruel manner of putting out the eyes of conquered princes, and of cutting away the eyelids of soldiers taken in war, to make them unfit for service.

"I have lived in many convents of friars of different orders, been present at their creation to various degrees, and have a.s.sisted at numberless entertainments upon those occasions.

"I have been in almost every female nunnery in all Europe (_on account of my profession_), and could write many volumes on the adventures of these religious beauties.

"I have been present at the making of nuns of almost every order, and a.s.sisted at the religious feasts given on those occasions.

"I have met with a very great variety of singular religious people called Pilgrims.

"I have been present at many extraordinary diversions designed for the amus.e.m.e.nt of the sovereign, viz. hunting of different sorts of wild beasts, as in Poland; bull-fighting, as in Spain.

"I am well acquainted with all the various punishments for different crimes, as practised in every nation--been present at the putting of criminals to death by various ways, viz. striking off heads, breaking on the wheel, &c.

"I am also well instructed in the different ways of giving the torture to extract confession--and am no stranger to other singular punishments, such as impaling, burying alive with head above ground, &c.

"And lastly, I have a.s.sisted, have seen the manner of embalming dead bodies of great personages, and am well instructed in the manner practised in some nations for preserving them entire for ages, with little alteration of figure from what they were when first deprived of life....

"All must agree that no man ever had a greater variety of matter worthy to be conveyed to posterity. I shall, therefore, give my best care to, so to paint my thoughts, and give such a dress of the story of my life, that tho' I shall talk of the Great, the Least shall not find cause of offence."

The occasion of this great man issuing so modest a proposal to the public is involved in some mystery. It would seem that he determined to publish his own version of his adventures, in consequence of being dissatisfied with his son's sketch of them. John Taylor, Junior, was then resident in Hatton Garden, living as an eye-doctor, and entered into an arrangement with a publisher, without his father's consent, to write the Chevalier's biography. Affixed to the indecent pamphlet, which was the result of this agreement, are the following epistolary statements:--

"MY SON,--If you should unguardedly have suffered your name at the head of a work which must make us all contemptible, this must be printed in it as the best apology for yourself and father:--

"TO THE PRINTER.

"Oxford, Jan. 10, 1761.

"My dear and only son having respectfully represented to me that he has composed a work, int.i.tled _My Life and Adventures_, and requires my consent for its publication, notwithstanding I am as yet a stranger to the composition, and consequently can be no judge of its merits, I am so well persuaded that my son is in every way incapable of saying aught of his father but what must redound to his honour and reputation, and so perfectly convinced of the goodness of his heart, that it does not seem possible I should err in my judgment, by giving my consent to a publication of the said work. And as I have long been employed in writing my own Life and Adventures, which will with all expedition be published, 'twill hereafter be left with all due attention to the candid reader, whether the Life of the Father written by the son, or the Life of the Father written by himself, best deserves approbation.

"THE CHEVALIER TAYLOR,

"Opthalmiater, Pontifical, Imperial, and Royal.

"* * * The above is a true copy of the letter my Father sent me. All the answer I can make to the bills he sends about the town and country is, that I have maintained my mother these eight years, and do this at the present time; and that, two years since, I was concerned for him, for which I have paid near ?200.

"As witness my hand, "JOHN TAYLOR, _Oculist_."

"Hatton Garden."

It is impossible to say whether these differences were genuine, or only feigned by the two quacks, in order to keep silly people gossiping about them. Certainly the accusations brought against the Chevalier, that he had sponged on his son, and declined to support his wife, are rather grave ones to introduce into a make-believe quarrel.

But, on the other hand, when the Chevalier's autobiography appeared it was prefaced with the following dedicatory letter to his son:--

"MY DEAR SON,--Can I do ill when I address to you the story of your father's life? Whose name can be so proper as your own to be prefixed to a work of this kind? You who was born to represent me living, when I shall cease to be--born to pursue that most excellent and important profession to which I have for so many years labored to be useful--born to defend my cause and support my fame--may I not _presume_, my son, that you will defend your father's cause? May I not _affirm_ that you, my son, will support your father's fame?

After having this said, need I add more than remind you--that, to a father, nothing can be so dear as a deserving son--nor state so desirable as that of the man who holds his successor, and knows him to be worthy. Be prosperous. Be happy.

"I am, your affectionate Father, "THE CHEVALIER JOHN TAYLOR."

This unctuous address to "my lion-hearted boy" is equalled in drollery by many pa.s.sages of the work itself, which (in the language of the t.i.tle-page) "contains all most worthy the attention of a Traveller--also a dissertation on the Art of Pleasing, with the most interesting observations on the Force of Prejudice; numberless adventures, as well amongst nuns and friars as with persons in high life; with a description of a great variety of the most admirable relations, which, though told in his well-known peculiar manner, each one is strictly true, and within the Chevalier's own observations and knowledge."

Apart from the bombast of his style, the Chevalier's "well-known peculiar manner" was remarkable for little besides tautology and a fantastic arrangement of words. In his orations, when he aimed at sublimity, he indulged in short sentences each of which commenced with a genitive case followed by an accusative; after which came the verb succeeded by the nominative. Thus, at such crises of grandiloquence, instead of saying, "I will lecture on the wonders of the eye," he would invert the order to, "Of the eye on the wonders lecture will I."

By doing this, he maintained that he surpa.s.sed the finest periods of Tully! There is a letter in Nichols's "Literary Anecdotes," in which a lecture given by this mountebank at Northampton is excellently described. "The doctor," says the writer, "appeared dressed in black, with a long light flowing ty'd wig; ascended a scaffold behind a large table raised about two feet from the ground, and covered with an old piece of tapestry, on which was laid a dark-coloured cafoy chariot-seat with four black bunches (used upon hea.r.s.es) tyed to the corners for ta.s.sels, four large candles on each side of the cushion, and a quart decanter of drinking water, with a half-pint gla.s.s, to moisten his mouth."

The fellow boasted that he was the author of forty-five works in different languages. Once he had the audacity to challenge Johnson to talk Latin with him. The doctor responded with a quotation from Horace, which the charlatan took to be the doctor's own composition.

"_He said a few words well enough_," Johnson said magnanimously when he repeated the story to Boswell. "Taylor," said the doctor, "is the most ignorant man I ever knew, but sprightly; Ward, the dullest."

John Taylor, Junr., survived his father more than fifteen years, and to the last had a lucrative business in Hatton Garden. His father had been oculist to George the Second; but this post, on the death of the Chevalier, he failed to obtain, it being given to a foreign _prot?g?_ of the Duke of Bedford's. He made a great noise about the sufferings of the poor, and proposed to the different parishes of London to attend the paupers labouring under diseases of the eye at two guineas a-year for each parish. He was an illiterate, vulgar, and licentious scoundrel; and yet when he died, on the 17th September, 1787, he was honoured with a long memoir in the _Gentleman's Magazine_, as one "whose philanthropy was exerted so fully as to cla.s.s him with a Hanway or a Howard."

If an apology is needed for giving so much s.p.a.ce, in a chapter devoted to the ladies, to the John Taylors, it must be grounded on the fact that the Chevalier was the son of an honest widow woman who carried on a respectable business, as an apothecary and doctress, at Norwich. In this she resembled Mrs. Blood, the wife of the Colonel of that name, who for years supported herself and son at Romford, by keeping an apothecary's shop under the name of Weston. Colonel Blood was also himself a member of the Faculty. For some time, whilst meditating his _grand coup_, he practised as a doctor in an obscure part of the City, under the name of Ayliffe.

Two hundred years since the lady pract.i.tioners of medicine in the provinces not seldom had working for them pupils and a.s.sistants of the opposite s.e.x, and this usage was maintained in secluded districts till a comparatively recent date. In Houghton's Collection, Nov. 15, 1695, is the following advertis.e.m.e.nt,--"If any Apothecary's Widow that keeps a shop in the country wants a journeyman that has lived 25 years for himself in London, and has had the conversation of the eminent physicians of the colledge, I can help to such an one."

CHAPTER XVII.

MESSENGER MONSEY.

Amongst the celebrities of the medical profession, who have left no memorial behind them more durable or better known than their wills in Doctors' Commons, was Messenger Monsey, the great-grandfather of our ex-Chancellor, Lord Cranworth.

We do not know whether his Lordship is aware of his descent from the eccentric physician. Possibly he is not, for the Monseys, though not altogether of a plebeian stock, were little calculated to throw ?clat over the genealogy of a patrician house.

Messenger Monsey, who used with a good deal of unnecessary noise to declare his contempt of the ancestral honours which he in reality possessed, loved to tell of the humble origin of his family. The first Duke of Leeds delighted in boasting of his lucky progenitor, Jack Osborn, the shop lad, who rescued his master's daughter from a watery grave, in the Thames, and won her hand away from a host of n.o.ble suitors, who wanted--literally, the young lady's _pin_-money. She was the only child of a wealthy pinmaker carrying on his business on London Bridge, and the jolly old fellow, instead of disdaining to bestow his heiress on a 'prentice, exclaimed, "Jack won her, and he shall wear her!" Dr. Monsey, in the hey-day of his social fame, told his friends that the first of his ancestors of any note was a baker, and a retail dealer in hops. At a critical point of this worthy man's career, when hops were "down" and feathers were "up," to raise a small sum of money for immediate use he ripped open his beds, sold the feathers, and stuffed the tick with unsaleable hops. Soon a change in the market occurred, and once more operating on the couches used by himself and children, he sold the hops at a profit, and bought back the feathers. "That's the way, sir, by which my family hopped from obscurity!" the doctor would conclude.

We have reason for thinking that this ancestor was the physician's great-grandfather. As is usually found to be the case, where a man thinks lightly of the advantages of birth, Messenger was by no means of despicable extraction. His grandfather was a man of considerable property, and married Elizabeth Messenger, co-heir of Thomas Messenger, lord of Whitwell Manor, in the county of Norfolk, a gentleman by birth and position; and his father, the Rev. Robert Monsey, a Norfolk rector, married Mary, the daughter of Roger Clopton, rector of Downham. Of the antiquity and importance of the Cloptons amongst the gentle families of England this is no place to speak; but further particulars relative to the Monsey pedigree may be found by the curious in Bloomfield's "History of Norfolk." On such a descent a Celt would persuade himself that he represented kings and rulers.

Monsey, like Sydney Smith after him, preferred to cover the whole question with jolly, manly ridicule, and put it out of sight.

Messenger Monsey was born in 1693, and received in early life an excellent education; for though his father at the Revolution threw his lot in with the nonjurors, and forfeited his living, the worthy clergyman had a sufficient paternal estate to enable him to rear his only child without any painful considerations of cost. After spending five years at St. Mary's Hall, Cambridge, Messenger studied physic for some time under Sir Benjamin Wrench, at Norwich. Starting on his own account, he practised for a while at Bury St. Edmunds, in Suffolk, but with little success. He worked hard, and yet never managed in that prosperous and beautiful country town to earn more than three hundred guineas in the same year. If we examined into the successes of medical celebrities, we should find in a great majority of cases fortune was won by the aspirant either annexing himself to, and gliding into the confidence of, a powerful clique, or else by his being through some lucky accident thrown in the way of a patron. Monsey's rise was of the latter sort. He was still at Bury, with nothing before him but the prospect of working all his days as a country doctor, when Lord G.o.dolphin, son of Queen Anne's Lord Treasurer, and grandson of the great Duke of Marlborough, was seized, on the road to Newmarket, with an attack of apoplexy. Bury was the nearest point where medical a.s.sistance could be obtained. Monsey was summoned, and so fascinated his patient with his conversational powers that his Lordship invited him to London, and induced him to relinquish his country practice.

From that time Monsey's fortune was made. He became to the Whigs very much what, in the previous generation, Radcliffe had been to the Tories. Sir Robert Walpole genuinely loved him, seizing every opportunity to enjoy his society, and never doing anything for him; and Lord Chesterfield was amongst the most zealous trumpeters of his medical skill. Lively, sagacious, well-read, and brutally sarcastic, he had for a while a society reputation for wit scarcely inferior to Swift's; and he lived amongst men well able to judge of wit. Garrick and he were for many years intimate friends, until, in a contest of jokes, each of the two brilliant men lost his temper, and they parted like Roland and Sir Leoline--never to meet again. Garrick probably would have kept his temper under any other form of ridicule, but he never ceased to resent Monsey's reflection on his avarice to the Bishop of Sodor and Man.

"Garrick is going to quit the stage," observed the Bishop.

"That he'll never do," answered Monsey, making use of a Norfolk proverb, "so long as he knows a guinea is cross on one side and pile on the other."

This speech was never forgiven. Lord Bath endeavoured to effect a reconciliation between the divided friends, but his amiable intention was of no avail.

"I thank you," said Monsey; "but why will your Lordship trouble yourself with the squabbles of a Merry Andrew and quack doctor?"

When the tragedian was on his death-bed, Monsey composed a satire on the sick man, renewing the attack on his parsimony. Garrick's illness, however, terminating fatally, the doctor destroyed his verses, but some sc.r.a.ps of them still remain to show their spirit and power. A consultation of physicians was represented as being held over the actor:--