Professions, like petticoats, ought to be discreetly concealed

Our Lawyers are mere lawyers, our physicians are mere physicians, our divines are mere divines. Everything smells of the shop, and you will, in a few minutes conversation, infallibly detect a man's profession.

-- John Gardiner, "perhaps Boston's most distinguished man of letters in the first decade of the nineteenth century," in Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815, at 709.