Page:Critical Woodcuts (1926).pdf/254

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of fact, Osler had not a particle of malice toward old men; he had always, on the contrary, a special fondness for them. Significantly, he praised the French lecturer's habit of constant reference to "my distinguished Master." His remarks about old men had come out of his humility and his quizzical kindness. What he had meant to suggest was that he himself was on the verge of "senility," and that consequently his colleagues would not lose much by his migration to Oxford. He was tenderly trying to temper the wind of his departure to his shorn lambs. He had long been an advocate, however, of a "quinquennial braindusting," and he believed in the "peripatetic" life as a preventative of premature old age. I think it is clear that his growth in the years of his English residence was rather social, historical, and literary than scientific.

He had to take his part as a medical officer in the war, but I find no evidence that his heart was in it. He simply bowed to the inevitable as silently as possible. The entire vast madness lay entirely outside his scheme and philosophy of life. The Stoics whom he loved, Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus, and his adored Sir Thomas Browne, had taught him early to denationalize himself, to think of the human race fraternally, and to cultivate charity toward all men. As a man of science, he knew that he must be a cosmopolitan: there are no national boundaries to the commonwealth of science. And so he went about with tight lips and a stricken heart visiting the hospitals and preparing himself to surrender all that makes life of much account to a man who has done his work. In the second volume Dr. Cushing gives us some captivating glimpses of Osler's notable wife and of his only son, an affectionate boy after his father's own heart, and with his own