HARVARD COLLEGE LIBRARY Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1871, by J. B. LIPPINCOTT & CO. In the Office of the Librarian of Congress at Washington. ODD HOURS OF A PHYSICIAN. A ANTECEDENTS. BOOK, as a man, has antecedents. Acquaintance with either is not, perhaps, better to be commenced than by learning something of such preassociations. The antecedents of this little volume are found in the circumstances, that the author having written a book which was not without a satisfactory share of success, it brought from his publisher a request for a second; and this so persuasively worded—as reference was had to the banker-that to have denied it would have been to admit that a person may be afflicted with the cacoethes scribendi, and at the same time be insusceptible to the solid arguments of the book-makers,-a thing, so far as the author can learn, never yet known, and not well to be made a precedent by anybody. Terms settled (it is comfortable to have all responsibility on the back of the publisher), it remained simply to decide as to the nature of the new book, and to secure consent to the employment upon the title-page of a name differing from that upon the first book, as well as that on the record page of the author's family Bible; not that a nom de plume designates an especial modesty, or is indicative of any particular indifference: on the contrary, it may be doubted if such shielding of one's identity is not rather of questionable signification. Without consuming pages, however, in the discussion of this matter, it may be asserted, without fear of successful contradiction, that nowadays, as everybody runs into print, the private station has become the seat of honor, and one may not be rebuked in desiring to be classed with the most respectable company. Again, one may not be averse to giving forth thoughts, good, bad, or indifferent, as they may prove, yet not deem it necessary to the influence of the writing that in propria persona he be associated with them. If a thing be good, what odds who created it? And if it be bad, certainly the less it has to support it the better. Still another reason which may influence a writer in disguising the ego is, that in this very practical age the world has come to judge of a man by what it is pleased to term his stability. A man must be inferred to be thinking of one thing all the time,-"sticking to his work, as we have it. A doctor is not to don a straw hat, neither is he to take off his black coat. A blacksmith had much better set fire to his smithy than let a patron find a work on Paleology upon his workbench. Everybody thinks, thinks all kinds of thoughts, and about all kinds of things, and the thoughts of everybody are interesting to somebody. The thoughts of Socrates, and of his pupil Plato, interest the world, and have done so for the past two thousand years. A village politician or metaphysician is not without his share of auditors, even though the coffee-bags and barrels in the back part of the country store furnish abundance of seat-room for all of them. I will write |
