About six months after the death of Radcliffe, I was present at a consultation between Sir Hans Sloane, Dr. Cheyne, and Mead. It was held on the case of Bishop Burnet, the prelate so celebrated for the “History of his own Time,” and for the active part he had taken in the great transactions of that eventful period.
He had been taken ill of a violent cold, which soon turned to a pleurisy; and this increasing, and baffling all remedies, his worthy friend and relation Dr. Cheyne called in the assistance of the two other doctors. Up to this time Burnet had enjoyed uninterrupted good health, which he attributed, not without reason, to his temperate habits. “I will give you,” said the venerable patient to Dr. Mead (for the Bishop was now 72 years old), “a short outline of my course of life. In summer I have been in the habit of rising at five in the morning, in the winter at six; and I have always officiated myself at prayer, though my chaplains may have been present. I then took my tea in company with my children, and read the Scriptures with them. I have generally spent six or eight hours a day in my study. The rest of the day has been passed by me in taking exercise, making friendly visits or cheerful meals. But now, to use an expression of my late gracious master King William, whom I knew well for sixteen years, I feel ‘_que je tire vers ma fin_.’”
The Doctors listened to the melancholy presage of the Bishop, and having put the necessary questions to him, withdrew into the adjoining apartment, for the purpose of consultation. I was now in company with two physicians of great eminence, though of very different characters. On the one side of me stood Sir Hans Sloane, who had shortly before been created a baronet by His Majesty George the First, being the first physician upon whom an hereditary title of honour had ever been conferred; in his person tall and well made, sprightly in conversation, easy, polite and engaging in his manners, by birth an Irishman. On the other was Dr. Cheyne, a Scotchman, with an immense broad back, taking snuff incessantly out of a ponderous gold box, and thus ever and anon displaying to view his fat knuckles: a perfect Falstaff, for he was not only a good portly man and a corpulent[13], but was almost as witty as the knight himself, and his humour being heightened by his northern brogue, he was exceeding mirthful. Indeed he was the most excellent banterer of his time, a faculty he was often called upon to exercise, to repel the lampoons which were made by others upon his extraordinary personal appearance. Nothing could be more striking than the contrast of the two celebrated men before me.