Page:Transactions of the Provincial Medical and Surgical Association, volume 2.djvu/576

 very indifferent to society, except the society of accomplished persons; and, of late years, he shunned every public amusement. As his youth had been passed without irregularity, so his maturer years were passed with uniform and strict propriety. He was fastidious as to the society of females, indifferent to music, he never played cards, and conviviality had no charms for him. As too often happens with studious men, he was, to a certain degree, insensible to the pleasures even of domestic life, although always to be found at home, and always evincing an extreme anxiety concerning the education of his daughters, and every prospective circumstance connected with the happiness of the objects of his tenderest affection. Of his affectionate attachment to his wife and children, to his parents, his sisters, and his brothers, several memorials, connected with many painful incidents, now remain, to which it is unnecessary to give publicity. His letters to myself on the occasion of the death of some of his relatives, breathe a tenderness of disposition to which he seldom permitted himself to give expression.

I would willingly close this account of him without alluding to his cares, his difficulties, and those honourable anxieties which had too surely prepared him to fall under any severe attack of illness. Although for the last two or three years of his life his practice had greatly increased, he had endured, for full ten years, all the restlessness of hope deferred; and, carefully maintaining his proper station in society, and scrupulously correct in all his payments, had found it necessary to incur extensive pecuniary engagements. There exists no reason, that I am