ART. II.-The Life and Works of John Arbuthnot, M.D., Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians. By George A. Aitken. 1892. Fall the celebrated wits of Queen Anne's age the least known is Arbuthnot. Every one who has any acquaintance with English literature is aware that he was the friend and physician of Pope, without whose aid the world had wanted many an idle song.' A smaller circle of students has read his once famous jeu d'esprit, which obtained for this country the lasting sobriquet of John Bull. And a few, a very few, know of him also as the author of the Memoirs,' which relate the adventures of the odd literary hero, Martinus Scriblerus. For the great majority of Englishmen nothing survives of him but his name. Yet this name is surrounded with a brilliant reputation. By his contemporaries, Arbuthnot was universally admired. Lord Chesterfield says of him: To great and various erudition he joined an infinite fund of wit and humour, to which his friends Pope and Swift were more obliged than they have acknowledged themselves to be. His imagination was almost inexhaustible, and whatever subject he treated, or was consulted upon, he immediately overflowed with all that it could possibly produce.' In the next generation Johnson gave him the foremost place in an age fruitful of fine intellects. I think Dr. Arbuthnot the first man among them,' said he to Boswell. He was the most universal genius, being an excellent physician, a man of deep learning, and a man of much humour.' In our own day Thackeray, echoing the opinion of Johnson, speaks of him as one of the wisest, wittiest, most accomplished, gentlest of mankind.' Mr. Aitken has done excellent service to English literature in bringing together the evidence which seems to support the verdict of such eminent authorities respecting a remarkable man. His task has been performed with all the untiring zeal and industry, and with all the accuracy, that distinguished his 'Life of Steele.' He has been indefatigable in tracing whatever can be discovered of Arbuthnot's family and descent; he has collected from standard works his letters. to Pope and Swift, and has added to them his correspondence with other persons which has never before been published; he has looked for every mention of the man himself in contemporary literature; and he has furnished a most useful bibliographical list of his writings. The only omission which we note in his biography is a critical estimate of his hero's character as a man and a humorist. But perhaps this did not form part of of Mr. Aitken's design; and we think that our readers may be grateful to us if, taking the biographical materials which he has provided in connexion with the history of Arbuthnot's times, we attempt to bring into somewhat stronger relief the figure of a writer who has been so highly praised and who is so little known. John Arbuthnot, born in 1667, was the eldest son of Alexander Arbuthnot-Parson of Arbuthnotta cadet of a family of distinction which had been settled in the county of Kincardineshire since the thirteenth century, and the principal branch of which had been ennobled in the reign of Charles I. Alexander was a firm Episcopalian, and when the General Assembly was restored in 1690 he refused to conform to it, and was in consequence deprived of his living by his patron, Viscount Arbuthnot. His second son, Robert, was engaged on the Jacobite side at the battle of Killiecrankie, and after the extinction of this gleam of success the family retired to an ancestral farm called Kinghornie in the neighbourhood of Kinneff, where Alexander died in 1691. The bigotry of the Presbyterians, pursuing the nonjuror after death, made difficulties over his burial, and even seems, by exacting rigorous conditions, to have deprived him of a monument to his grave. That sarcastic, though not illnatured, opinion of human nature which his son John expressed in his writings and conversation may have had its foundation in these early experiences. After his father's death John came to London to seek his fortune, and supported himself by teaching mathematics, his first patron being William Pate, the learned woollen draper, so often mentioned by Swift in his Journal to Stella. Pate no doubt spoke of the abilities of the young Scotchman to his friends in the City, one of whom, Alderman Jeffrey Jeffreys, engaged him to instruct his son Edward, and in 1694-an interesting fact first discovered by Mr. Aitken-entered him, as tutor and companion to the latter, at University College, Oxford. Arbuthnot was now in his twenty-eighth year, an age so much beyond that of the ordinary undergraduate that we may suppose him, in his capacity of fellow-commoner, to have been exempted from the usual academical course, and to have been admitted to the College merely as the private tutor of young Jeffreys. Such special arrangements were not uncommon in those aristocratic days, and it may be observed that almost at the same time Addison, after taking his own degree, was performing a similar task of bear-leading to a young commoner at Magdalen. There is at any rate no record of Arbuthnot having graduated at Oxford, but in 1696 he took the degree of Doctor of of Medicine at the University of St. Andrews, the Principal of which wrote to Dr. Charlett, Master of University College, that 'Dr. Arbuthnot had acquitt himself extraordinarily well both in his private and publick tryalls in solemn meetings of several Professors and Doctors of Medicine towards his promotion.' From the very interesting series of his letters to Dr. Charlett, now published for the first time by Mr. Aitken, it is plain that Arbuthnot's task as private tutor was not an easy one. 'Mr. Edward' was not inclined to sacrifice to the Muses. The stray hints which his preceptor, with a dry humour all his own, drops respecting his charge, reveal to us the character of the Jeffreys household. There is a fond City father anxious for the advancement of his son in the humanities,' studious to commemorate academical benefits by the erection of a stained glass window in the college chapel, but at the same time sadly in doubt as to whether a University education for an idle young man is financially justifiable; while young Hopeful, who at the outset, in spite of some peccadilloes, 'behaves himself very prettily,' soon allows his imagination to stray in pursuit of martial glory. We are very acceptable,' writes his guide, philosopher, and friend, April 30, 1696, and Mr. Edward behaves himself very much to his father's satisfaction. I hope we shall see Oxford within a month, for our military exploits are deferred a year longer; I took the effectual method to stop them. Mr. Jennings told me he had exposed that project sufficiently before he had mine.' But in less than two months the prospect, in spite of the personal intervention of the Master of the College, is again overclouded. 6 'I thank you heartily for yours which I had the other day. Mr. Edward had his book, but the letter his father kept, because he wold not lett him know of any design he had of taking him from Oxford. His father talks now of sending him there in the winter, and keeping his chamber for him still in case he should have occasion for it. For the present we have entirely quarrelled with all human learning, so that tho' your book be a very noble present and finely printed, the football and cudgell had bin better for us. . . . I have chid Mr. Edward in being so negligent in writing to his tutor, but he treats him like the rest of his business; his father sayes he repents his having taken him from Oxford. You may imagine it is a wondrous hard task to send him back again. We have had twenty resolutions, but the present design is to bring him up to his own business, and perhaps, as I hinted before, to send him to Oxford in winter; such an unsteddiness makes me incapable to doe him any service, and for my part I am resolved on some other course of life, wherein I cannot doubt of your kindness, because you never gave me the least occasion to doe so.' We Vol. 176.-No. 352. Y We learn with satisfaction from Mr. Aitken that this not uncommon specimen of an Oxford undergraduate settled down, some fifteen years after the above letter was written, into a sober M.P., and represented Brecon for three years, after which he vanishes into a reasonable obscurity. The tutor's labours in this rather ungrateful sphere were compensated in the 'other course of life' for which he exchanged them. Charlett's literary and social acquaintance was extensive; Sir Jeffrey Jeffreys had considerable political influence; Arbuthnot's own conversational gifts and companionable temper gained him friends wherever he went. All conditions were therefore in his favour when he entered upon his career as a doctor in London. A couple of scientific treatises, one controversial and the other purely theoretical, drew on him the attention of the learned world; and we find him soon after his arrival in London in the company of men of letters, then so well known as Creech, the translator of Horace; Wanley, the antiquary, afterwards librarian to the second Earl of Oxford, a name familiar through the verses of Pope and Gay; and of one whose writings are never likely to fall into neglect, while the manners of their ancestors continue to interest English readers, the diarist, Samuel Pepys. Arbuthnot's fame is rather literary than professional; but even if he had not earned a position among the wits of the time, his name would doubtless have been recorded among the physicians whom the gratitude or the spleen of those wits has celebrated-Sloane, Radcliffe, Mead, and Woodward. In 1704 his scientific eminence was recognized by his election as a Fellow of the Royal Society, and in the following year he was appointed to serve on a committee-of which Sir Isaac Newton and Sir Christopher Wren were also members— for correcting the observations of the Astronomer Royal. Nor was he less successful in practice, for as early as 1702 he had gained a position which enabled him to marry, and he must have enjoyed a high character for medical skill when the event occurred which gave a decisive turn to the whole course of his life and genius. In 1705 the Prince Consort, George of Denmark, happened to fall ill at Epsom, and Arbuthnot, being called in to advise, was successful in treating his case. The Prince in consequence continued to employ him as his own physician till his death in 1708; at the same time he was appointed Physician Extraordinary to the Queen, and from this position was promoted, on the death of Dr. Hannes in 1709, to be the Queen's Physician in Ordinary. Never did a more favourable opportunity for the exercise of political influence open to any man's ambition; few men, it may may be added, could have availed themselves of the opening with greater skill than Arbuthnot. The only office that can approach the importance of a favourite Court physician is that of confessor to a monarch of the Roman Catholic faith. In both situations the man of science is master of the weakness of human nature in the highest places; in both the credit and confidence he obtains with the source of authority may enable him to give a direction to the course of affairs. It may be questioned, however, whether the doctor, free as he is from the suspicion which must naturally attend the director of the conscience, perhaps in the mind of his patient, certainly in those of his ministers, does not dispose of the more abundant power. His advice, when it is asked for by those who have constantly profited by his skill and judgment, seems naturally weighty; he can solicit preferment for his friends without being supposed to be actuated by selfish motives, or to be trenching on the prerogative of his master; and should he insinuate doubts as to the wisdom of a minister, he need not be suspected of professional jealousy. If these are the opportunities enjoyed by the personal physician of any monarch, they become specially frequent in a constitutional monarchy, where power is so largely based upon opinion; more frequent still when the constitutional monarch is a woman; and most frequent when that woman finds herself in the situation of Queen Anne in the years 1710-1714. The Revolution of 1688, with the domestic and foreign policy which grew out of it, was undoubtedly founded on a Whig principle. ""It was then " [i.e. about 1704], says Swift, "I began to trouble myself with the differences between the principles of Whig and Tory; having formerly employed myself in other, and I think much better speculations. I talked often with Lord Somers; told him that, having been long conversant with the Greek and Roman authors, and therefore a lover of liberty, I found myself much inclined to be what they call a Whig in politics; and that, besides, I thought it impossible upon any other principle to defend or submit to the Revolution."* Swift's opinions were shared by the great majority of moderate men throughout the country. The Tories had acquiesced in those enactments of the Bill of Rights which limited the power of the Crown, and in the Act which provided for the Protestant succession. They had also approved of the foreign policy entailed by the Revolution, the main objects of which were to 6 * Memoirs relating to the Change in Queen Anne's Ministry.' resist |