every parish have its own proper spiritual guardian, poor indeed still in very many cases, but yet with less limited means of exercising charity and hospitality than the still poorer curate; and though in many instances it might happen that the parish would be no gainer by the exchange, (for curates are allowed by the country to be, in general, in these days no drones,) still it would be something to meet the reproach now so often cast upon the church, that one man feeds the sheep whilst another shears them-not to say that the rector would be no longer brought into invidious comparison, as at present, with his curate, in the eyes of his parishioners ;-with his curate, who enjoys an unwholesome popularity, founded often, if the truth were known, rather upon the covetousness of the people than upon his own worth;—and the church at large would not be left to suffer by the notion thus naturally put into the heads of tithe-payers, that the services required of the minister may be done (for, in fact, they see them done in a manner) at far less cost perhaps than the amount of their tithes.

We have ventured upon these remarks chiefly with a view to ascertain the feeling of the clergy, conscious that the question is one of great difficulty and delicacy; persuaded that even the incumbents of our best livings are, for the most part, so burdened with parochial and other claims upon them, (for the clergy are generally of a rank to have poor relations,) that they can afford as ill as any men to have an additional tax laid upon their incomes; but, withal, utterly hopeless, from the temper of the times, (unless it should please God, by some scourge of his own, to create a stronger interest for religion in the hearts of the people,) utterly hopeless, we say, that the wants of the church, however crying, will be relieved by any other class than the ministers of the church themselves.

ART. IV. The Catechism of Health; or, Plain and Simple Rules for the Preservation of Health, and the Attainment of a Long Life. By A. B. Granville, M.D., F.R.S., F.A.S., F.S.S., M.R.I., &c., &c., &c. Fourth Edition, with Additions. London. 1832.

THIS

HIS is a severe, though covert, satire on the tribe of bookmakers in general, and especially on the medical portion of that tribe. It has been remarked, (by J. Warton, we believe,) that the keenest ridicule of the abuses or absurdities of the medical art has proceeded from physicians; and the classical names of Garth, Arbuthnot, and Smollett verify the observation. The little work now before us is another proof of this disposition; and without venturing to place Dr. Granville in the literary scale, by the side of the three great authors we have just mentioned, we

must

must

say that his work appears to us to be a more caustic exposure of the self-sufficiency, inanity, and impudence of a certain class of medical writers, than anything which we can remember in Smollett, Arbuthnot, or Garth.

It has been suspected, and we believe with justice, that these great men in their pleasantries upon others did not spare themselves; and some of the anecdotes and adventures with which they have amused the world are said to have happened to them individually. Such a superiority over personal vanity, as well as over professional prejudices, does honour to the mind that is capable of it; and although we cannot presume to say how far Dr. Granville may have derived from his own experience some of the very laughable traits with which his book is replete, we cannot be blind to the many instances in which he exposes with great pleasantry and effect the compliances which he has himself been obliged to make with the fashion of the day; for instance, the enunciation of his name on the title-page :

A. B. GRANVILLE, M.D., F.R.S., F.A.S., F.S.S., M.R.I.,

&c.! &c.!! &c.!!!

is, to our taste, a very happy exposure of the vanity which some people, who have little other claim to be thought men of letters, derive from adding to their names a string of initials, some with, but many more, we believe, without a meaning. A semi-savant of the present day seems, like a Highland chief, to think it derogatory to appear in public without his tail on.* M.R.I. mean, we suppose, if they mean anything, Member of the Royal Institution -a kind of reading club to which, we believe, any one may become a subscriber, without even a ballot; and, when after Member of the Royal Institution, Dr. Granville adds, et cetera! et cetera!! et cetera!!! the climax is perfect, and the ridicule complete; and we venture to believe that we shall never again see M.R.I., &c., &c., &c., in the train of any, however superficial, pretenders to literary distinction. M.R.I. are henceforth, and for ever, dead letters-thanks to the exemplary pleasantry of Dr. Granville.

The next point of ridicule which the Doctor seizes, is another of the title-page frauds of the day. He designates his work as THE FOURTH EDITION,

6

WITH ADDITIONS.'

The reader, unless he has met with the literary cause celebre * Dr. Granville is really the Homo caudatus of Monboddo. If the reader has any curiosity to see the whole length of his tail, he will find it occupying half a page of the Quarterly Review,' vol. xxxix. p. 1. We are apprehensive that our observations on that occasion may have induced the Doctor to dock his tail as he has now done; we are sorry for it. In the former work, which affected to be serious, the étalage of insignificant titles was misplaced; but the present little book being, throughout, what we may call broad farce,' would have been all the better for such an absurd prologue: yet, after all, perhaps the ingenious detection of vanity veiled under three et ceteras is more effective than even the enumeration would have been.

of

of Leslie v. Blackwood, may not be aware, that when a book is so heavy as to afford little prospect of selling even one edition, it sometimes appears to run rapidly through second, third, and fourth editions, by the mere operation of stitching up the identical sheets of the first and only impression, with no other change or addition than a new title-page, bearing the words 'second,' 'third,' or 'fourth edition, as the case may be.

This trick Dr. Granville has fully elucidated. His fourth edition with additions' has NO additions, and is NOT a fourth edition. We have before us the soi-disant 'third' and 'fourth' editions, and we find, first, as to additions, that there is not one page, one line, one word, one letter in the fourth edition, which is not in the third; and, secondly, we see that every sheet (always excepting the title-page) of 'edition the fourth' was printed from the same types and at the same time as the sheets which are designated as edition the third.' This is proved by various little circumstances obvious to those who are acquainted with the practice of printing; we need give the common reader but one, which is as good as a hundred :-in page vii. of the preface these words occur, who, from his official situation;' but, in the third edition, the letter ƒ had, by accident, dropped out, and the line appears, who, rom his official situation;' now if there had been a reprint, this accident must have disappeared, and the word would have stood in its proper shape; but no,-in the fourth edition we have just the same who, rom' that we had in the third. Our readers see at once, that an error of the press may be repeated in subsequent editions, but an accident never can; thus, if in the title-page Dr. Granville had been, instead of an F.A.S., designated as an A.S.S., that error might have been reprinted; but an accident,-a blot,-a letter inverted, a letter dropped out, can only happen in one impression; and if there were an hundred editions, it would be a hundred millions to one that such an accident did not occur in the same place in any two editions; but when we add that there are a hundred of such accidents occurring in the same places in these two (so called) editions, it follows to an absolute certainty that there has been no reprint, and that in this point also the doctor's title-page is jocose.›

But we almost doubt whether Dr. Granville has not pushed his satirical imitation of this mal-practice rather too far. We have shown that there was no fourth edition; but, still stranger to say, we suspect that there was not even a third, nor even a second. We are aware that satirists have a license to exaggerate, and that a parody, to make one laugh, is sometimes urged beyond the exact verge of truth; but we really doubt whether, in this instance, Dr. Granville has not pushed the pleasantry rather too far, and blunted a little the force of his ridicule, by using it too extra

vagantly.

vagantly. In his preface to the third edition,' in the true cant of those authors whom he holds up to public ridicule, he says, that within exactly one month after the publication of his first edition

He is called upon to announce, in a second preface, the appearance of a third edition. However flattering to his feelings this simple FACT might be, as showing the degree of kindness with which his humble effort has been received by that public for whose sole benefit the Catechism was produced, the author would not have ventured to intrude himself anew on their notice were it not for certain additional remarks which the nature of the work and its reception seem to authorise. A few corrections and some additions have been made to the first and second parts of the work; these are intended either to render the language, already plain, still plainer, or to enforce, with greater effect, certain principles or doctrines laid down in the text.'Second Preface, p. 14.

Now, all this seems to us un peu fort, as, we think, it will appear to our readers, when we inform them that the first edition of the Catechism of Health contained three hundred and thirty-six pages, comprising the first and second parts, and a considerable portion of the third, of the work. The second edition we have never been able to discover; but if it ever existed, it was, no doubt, a mere re-issue with a new title-page of the original impression. The third edition, as it calls itself, contains a new title-page, an additional preface, and some pages added at the conclusion of part the third; but the whole of the first and second parts, which the Doctor assures the indulgent public have been corrected and enlarged, are exactly, verbatim, literatim, and down even to the typographical defects, the very SAME as they were in the first edition, and, as they finally appear in the fourth; so that, as far as regards the great body of the work, there appears to have been, up to this hour, but one single edition; and the alleged corrections and additions to the first and second parts are mere merry fictions. This seems extravagant, even as satire, and we confess that we know no author to whom Dr. Granville's censure can fairly be applied; but if the doctor will, in another' edition, more clearly point out the culprit, he will, we fancy, look very foolish at the bar of the no longer indulgent public.

6

The next point of the literary charlatanerie which Dr. Granville exemplifies, and successfully ridicules, is the pretended rapidity-the kind of steam-engine velocity with which the gifted geniuses of the modern school achieve, what would have been to their ancestors works of long consideration and arduous labour. He tells us, in both his prefaces, that his original work was completed, within a fortnight from the day on which the idea was suggested to him,-three hundred and thirty-six closely printed

VOL. XLVII. NO. XCIV.

2 E

printed pages, taking so universal range over so extensive and complex a science in fourteen days, just twenty-four printed pages per diem! This is an admirable ridicule of such hyperboles; and the wonder is laughably heightened by the sly observation, that they are the miraculous product of the leisure hours' of a physician in great public and private practice. It is obvious that the mere manual operation of the penmanship could hardly have been performed within the time; and what a bitter satire it is, both on pretenders and dupes, to represent the public as greedily buying up four editions of a work on the most various, difficult, and important of all earthly subjects, which professes to have been composed faster than any ordinary clerk could copy it.

But the doctor has not yet expended his practical satire on the journeymen authors of the day-he follows up his blows rapidly and effectively.

·

The same individual,' he says, who suggested the work to him, 'placed into the hands of the author a small volume of foreign importation, bearing the title of the "Catechism of Health," without any author's name, and apparently written without any care or attentioni either to the facts or to the language in which they were conveyed.'— p. viii.

Here is a clear and precise statement, that the work alluded to was foreign and anonymous, and that Dr. Granville, who admits that he pressed a certain portion of its contents into his service,' was, as to such portion, only to be considered as a translator, but that as to all the rest, both facts and language, it was unfit for the Doctor's use. The Doctor here very pleasantly exemplifies the art of acknowledging an obligation in such an obscure and unsatisfactory manner, that it shall seem no obligation at all—the foreign language in which the little work is written is not even mentioned, and the extent to which the translator or compiler is indebted to the original is left delightfully vague. But this is not half the merit of this admirable parody of the confessions of a plagiary. We have hunted after this original Catechism of Health,' and we have found, and are able to prove to our readers, that it is not anonymous-that it even exists, and has for forty years existed, in the English language-and that Dr. Granville is, in some instances at least, not even a translator, but the servile copyist, of a former translator.

The Catechism of Health' was originally published in German in 1792, by Dr. Faust, one of the most eminent physicians in Germany, and who is we believe still alive. It was translated immediately into most European languages, and specially into English by Mr. Basse, whose version was printed in London in 1794, and republished in Edinburgh in 1797, by Mr. Creech, at the recommendation and under the inspection of Dr. Gregory,

and