the capital. Mr. Clay was commissioner on the part of the United States, at the treaty of Ghent, in 1814, and plenipotentiary for commercial arrangements with Great Britain in 1815. The profession {169} also owes much of its respectability to the ingress of young gentlemen of liberal education from the Atlantic States, who make diligent research in the history of cases, and whose libraries are usually stored with law authorities, and the best models of forensic eloquence in the English language.
The medical men here are all doctors, nor is the inferior degree, surgeon, at all recognised. In new settlements, many practise on life and limb who have not obtained the diploma of any medical school. The smallness of their laboratories renders it probable, that the universal medicine is included. Here, too, there are honoured exceptions; and the medical colleges instituted at Cincinnati and Lexington may soon furnish more accomplished practitioners.
The clergy would perhaps excuse my not giving their order the precedence, if they were told that men hold forth here, who can have no pretensions to qualifications derived from human tuition. Many of their harangues are composed of medley, declamation, and the most disgusting tautology. I have chiefly in view itinerant preachers of the methodist sect, who perhaps cry as loud as ever did the priests of Baal. Their hearers frequently join in loud vociferations, fall down, shake, and jerk in a style, that it would be in vain to attempt to describe.
Incapacity is not confined to those situations that ought to be filled with men of learning, but extends to the rudest branches of the mechanical arts. It is not thought wonderful to see a blacksmith without a screw plate; and I have known of several very plain pieces of joiner work
