Note 81 — CANTO III. MANIFESTO.

The patient save, but starve the doctor.

This would be abominable. Physicians, in general, are a hale hearty race of men, as, indeed, must be readily conceived from their prudent maxims in regard to the preservation of their own health:—they take no physic. No; they are too well acquainted with its tendency. Now, to starve so sturdy and powerful a body, when his majesty is in want of such subjects to check the ambitious strides of restless Buonaparte, as appears from the king’s declaration of this day (May the 16th, 1803,) in preference to letting their miserable patients expire, whom Providence evidently intended should die off, is, I trust, too absurd and unreasonable an idea to be admitted.