Page:Restorative medicine - an Harveian annual oration delivered at the Royal College of Physicians, London, on June 21, 1871 (the 210th anniversary) (IA restorativemedic00cham).pdf/43

RESTORATIVE MEDICINE. that their harness is their uniform, their decoration, their chiefest reward, and that they lay it aside only at the bidding of their commander-in-chief. When I was in Italy some years ago, on a holiday tour enforced by a surgical operation, I hesitated whether I should not lengthen my holiday to the end of my life, and leave the race to the swift, the battle to the strong. "Were it not better done, as others use, to sport with Amaryllis in the shade, or with the tangles of Newra's hair?" In visiting Pompeii, I stopped more than once at a sentry-box by the sea-gate, where there were found the skeleton and arms of a Roman legionary set on guard eighteen hundred years ago. That nameless sentry, I thought, ignorant, sensual heathen, whose bones lic mouldering among the debris of brothels of unmentionable atrocity and filthy wineshops, will yet to the resurrection-call answer "Adsum, Domine!" from a vantage-ground of dignity second to none in the universe, -at his post, waiting for orders to leave. And so I turned and came home.