prompt:
Chapter: "Black eyes you have left, you say,
     Blue eyes fail to draw you;
     Yet you seem more rapt to-day,
     Than of old we saw you.

    "Oh, I track the fairest fair
     Through new haunts of pleasure;
     Footprints here and echoes there
     Guide me to my treasure:

    "Lo! she turns--immortal youth
     Wrought to mortal stature,
     Fresh as starlight's aged truth--
     Many-named Nature!"

A great historian, as he insisted on calling himself, who had the
happiness to be dead a hundred and twenty years ago, and so to take his
place among the colossi whose huge legs our living pettiness is
observed to walk under, glories in his copious remarks and digressions
as the least imitable part of his work, and especially in those initial
chapters to the successive books of his history, where he seems to
bring his armchair to the proscenium and chat with us in all the lusty
ease of his fine English.  But Fielding lived when the days were longer
(for time, like money, is measured by our needs), when summer
afternoons were spacious, and the clock ticked slowly in the winter
evenings.  We belated historians must not linger after his example; and
if we did so, it is probable that our chat would be thin and eager, as
if delivered from a campstool in a parrot-house.  I at least have so
much to do in unraveling certain human lots, and seeing how they were
woven and interwoven, that all the light I can command must be
concentrated on this particular web, and not dispersed over that
tempting range of relevancies called the universe.

At present I have to make the new settler Lydgate better known to any
one interested in him than he could possibly be even to those who had
seen the most of him since his arrival in Middlemarch.  For surely all
must admit that a man may be puffed and belauded, envied, ridiculed,
counted upon as a tool and fallen in love with, or at least selected as
a future husband, and yet remain virtually unknown--known merely as a
cluster of signs for his neighbors' false suppositions.  There was a
general impression, however, that Lydgate was not altogether a common
country doctor, and in Middlemarch at that time such an impression was
significant of great things being expected from him.  For everybody's
family doctor was remarkably clever, and was understood to have
immeasurable skill in the management and training of the most skittish
or vicious diseases.  The evidence of his cleverness was of the higher
intuitive order, lying in his lady-patients' immovable conviction, and
was unassailable by any objection except that their intuitions were
opposed by others equally strong; each lady who saw medical truth in
Wrench and "the strengthening treatment" regarding Toller and "the
lowering system" as medical perdition.  For the heroic times of copious
bleeding and blistering had not yet departed, still less the times of
thorough-going theory, when disease in general was called by some bad
name, and treated accordingly without shilly-shally--as if, for
example, it were to be called insurrection, which must not be fired on
with blank-cartridge, but have its blood drawn at once.  The
strengtheners and the lowerers were all "clever" men in somebody's
opinion, which is really as much as can be said for any living talents.
Nobody's imagination had gone so far as to conjecture that Mr. Lydgate
could know as much as Dr. Sprague and Dr. Minchin, the two physicians,
who alone could offer any hope when danger was extreme, and when the
smallest hope was worth a guinea.  Still, I repeat, there was a general
impression that Lydgate was something rather more uncommon than any
general practitioner in Middlemarch.  And this was true.  He was but
seven-and-twenty, an age at which many men are not quite common--at
which they are hopeful of achievement, resolute in avoidance, thinking
that Mammon shall never put a bit in their mouths and get astride their
backs, but rather that Mammon, if they have anything to do with him,
shall draw their chariot.

He had been left an orphan when he was fresh from a public school.  His
father, a military man, had made but little provision for three
children, and when the boy Tertius asked to have a medical education,
it seemed easier to his guardians to grant his request by apprenticing
him to a country practitioner than to make any objections on the score
of family dignity.  He was one of the rarer lads who early get a
decided bent and make up their minds that there is something particular
in life which they would like to do for its own sake, and not because
their fathers did it.  Most of us who turn to any subject with love
remember some morning or evening hour when we got on a high stool to
reach down an untried volume, or sat with parted lips listening to a
new talker, or for very lack of books began to listen to the voices
within, as the first traceable beginning of our love.  Something of
that sort happened to Lydgate.  He was a quick fellow, and when hot
from play, would toss himself in a corner, and in five minutes be deep
in any sort of book that he could lay his hands on: if it were Rasselas
or Gulliver, so much the better, but Bailey's Dictionary would do, or
the Bible with the Apocrypha in it.  Something he must read, when he
was not riding the pony, or running and hunting, or listening to the
talk of men.  All this was true of him at ten years of age; he had then
read through "Chrysal, or the Adventures of a Guinea," which was
neither milk for babes, nor any chalky mixture meant to pass for milk,
and it had already occurred to him that books were stuff, and that life
was stupid.  His school studies had not much modified that opinion, for
though he "did" his classics and mathematics, he was not pre-eminent in
them.  It was said of him, that Lydgate could do anything he liked, but
he had certainly not yet liked to do anything remarkable.  He was a
vigorous animal with a ready understanding, but no spark had yet
kindled in him an intellectual passion; knowledge seemed to him a very
superficial affair, easily mastered: judging from the conversation of
his elders, he had apparently got already more than was necessary for
mature life.  Probably this was not an exceptional result of expensive
teaching at that period of short-waisted coats, and other fashions
which have not yet recurred.  But, one vacation, a wet day sent him to
the small home library to hunt once more for a book which might have
some freshness for him: in vain! unless, indeed, he took down a dusty
row of volumes with gray-paper backs and dingy labels--the volumes of
an old Cyclopaedia which he had never disturbed.  It would at least be
a novelty to disturb them.  They were on the highest shelf, and he
stood on a chair to get them down.  But he opened the volume which he
first took from the shelf: somehow, one is apt to read in a makeshift
attitude, just where it might seem inconvenient to do so.  The page he
opened on was under the head of Anatomy, and the first passage that
drew his eyes was on the valves of the heart.  He was not much
acquainted with valves of any sort, but he knew that valvae were
folding-doors, and through this crevice came a sudden light startling
him with his first vivid notion of finely adjusted mechanism in the
human frame.  A liberal education had of course left him free to read
the indecent passages in the school classics, but beyond a general
sense of secrecy and obscenity in connection with his internal
structure, had left his imagination quite unbiassed, so that for
anything he knew his brains lay in small bags at his temples, and he
had no more thought of representing to himself how his blood circulated
than how paper served instead of gold.  But the moment of vocation had
come, and before he got down from his chair, the world was made new to
him by a presentiment of endless processes filling the vast spaces
planked out of his sight by that wordy ignorance which he had supposed
to be knowledge.  From that hour Lydgate felt the growth of an
intellectual passion.

We are not afraid of telling over and over again how a man comes to
fall in love with a woman and be wedded to her, or else be fatally
parted from her.  Is it due to excess of poetry or of stupidity that we
are never weary of describing what King James called a woman's "makdom
and her fairnesse," never weary of listening to the twanging of the old
Troubadour strings, and are comparatively uninterested in that other
kind of "makdom and fairnesse" which must be wooed with industrious
thought and patient renunciation of small desires?  In the story of
this passion, too, the development varies: sometimes it is the glorious
marriage, sometimes frustration and final parting.  And not seldom the
catastrophe is bound up with the other passion, sung by the
Troubadours.  For in the multitude of middle-aged men who go about
their vocations in a daily course determined for them much in the same
way as the tie of their cravats, there is always a good number who once
meant to shape their own deeds and alter the world a little.  The story
of their coming to be shapen after the average and fit to be packed by
the gross, is hardly ever told even in their consciousness; for perhaps
their ardor in generous unpaid toil cooled as imperceptibly as the
ardor of other youthful loves, till one day their earlier self walked
like a ghost in its old home and made the new furniture ghastly.
Nothing in the world more subtle than the process of their gradual
change!  In the beginning they inhaled it unknowingly: you and I may
have sent some of our breath towards infecting them, when we uttered
our conforming falsities or drew our silly conclusions: or perhaps it
came with the vibrations from a woman's glance.

Lydgate did not mean to be one of those failures, and there was the
better hope of him because his scientific interest soon took the form
of a professional enthusiasm: he had a youthful belief in his
bread-winning work, not to be stifled by that initiation in makeshift
called his 'prentice days; and he carried to his studies in London,
Edinburgh, and Paris, the conviction that the medical profession as it
might be was the finest in the world; presenting the most perfect
interchange between science and art; offering the most direct alliance
between intellectual conquest and the social good.  Lydgate's nature
demanded this combination: he was an emotional creature, with a
flesh-and-blood sense of fellowship which withstood all the
abstractions of special study.  He cared not only for "cases," but for
John and Elizabeth, especially Elizabeth.

There was another attraction in his profession: it wanted reform, and
gave a man an opportunity for some indignant resolve to reject its
venal decorations and other humbug, and to be the possessor of genuine
though undemanded qualifications.  He went to study in Paris with the
determination that when he came home again he would settle in some
provincial town as a general practitioner, and resist the
irrational severance between medical and surgical knowledge in the
interest of his own scientific pursuits, as well as of the general
advance: he would keep away from the range of London intrigues,
jealousies, and social truckling, and win celebrity, however slowly, as
Jenner had done, by the independent value of his work.  For it must be
remembered that this was a dark period; and in spite of venerable
colleges which used great efforts to secure purity of knowledge by
making it scarce, and to exclude error by a rigid exclusiveness in
relation to fees and appointments, it happened that very ignorant young
gentlemen were promoted in town, and many more got a legal right to
practise over large areas in the country.  Also, the high standard held
up to the public mind by the College of Physicians, which gave its peculiar
sanction to the expensive and highly rarefied medical instruction
obtained by graduates of Oxford and Cambridge, did not hinder quackery
from having an excellent time of it; for since professional practice
chiefly consisted in giving a great many drugs, the public inferred
that it might be better off with more drugs still, if they could only
be got cheaply, and hence swallowed large cubic measures of physic
prescribed by unscrupulous ignorance which had taken no degrees.
Considering that statistics had not yet embraced a calculation as to
the number of ignorant or canting doctors which absolutely must exist
in the teeth of all changes, it seemed to Lydgate that a change in the
units was the most direct mode of changing the numbers.  He meant to be
a unit who would make a certain amount of difference towards that
spreading change which would one day tell appreciably upon the
averages, and in the mean time have the pleasure of making an
advantageous difference to the viscera of his own patients.  But he did
not simply aim at a more genuine kind of practice than was common.  He
was ambitious of a wider effect: he was fired with the possibility that
he might work out the proof of an anatomical conception and make a link
in the chain of discovery.

Does it seem incongruous to you that a Middlemarch surgeon should dream
of himself as a discoverer?  Most of us, indeed, know little of the
great originators until they have been lifted up among the
constellations and already rule our fates.  But that Herschel, for
example, who "broke the barriers of the heavens"--did he not once play
a provincial church-organ, and give music-lessons to stumbling
pianists?  Each of those Shining Ones had to walk on the earth among
neighbors who perhaps thought much more of his gait and his garments
than of anything which was to give him a title to everlasting fame:
each of them had his little local personal history sprinkled with small
temptations and sordid cares, which made the retarding friction of his
course towards final companionship with the immortals.  Lydgate was not
blind to the dangers of such friction, but he had plenty of confidence
in his resolution to avoid it as far as possible: being
seven-and-twenty, he felt himself experienced.  And he was not going to
have his vanities provoked by contact with the showy worldly successes
of the capital, but to live among people who could hold no rivalry with
that pursuit of a great idea which was to be a twin object with the
assiduous practice of his profession.  There was fascination in the
hope that the two purposes would illuminate each other: the careful
observation and inference which was his daily work, the use of the lens
to further his judgment in special cases, would further his thought as
an instrument of larger inquiry.  Was not this the typical pre-eminence
of his profession?  He would be a good Middlemarch doctor, and by that
very means keep himself in the track of far-reaching investigation.  On
one point he may fairly claim approval at this particular stage of his
career: he did not mean to imitate those philanthropic models who make
a profit out of poisonous pickles to support themselves while they are
exposing adulteration, or hold shares in a gambling-hell that they may
have leisure to represent the cause of public morality.  He intended to
begin in his own case some particular reforms which were quite
certainly within his reach, and much less of a problem than the
demonstrating of an anatomical conception.  One of these reforms was to
act stoutly on the strength of a recent legal decision, and simply
prescribe, without dispensing drugs or taking percentage from
druggists.  This was an innovation for one who had chosen to adopt the
style of general practitioner in a country town, and would be felt as
offensive criticism by his professional brethren.  But Lydgate meant to
innovate in his treatment also, and he was wise enough to see that the
best security for his practising honestly according to his belief was
to get rid of systematic temptations to the contrary.

Perhaps that was a more cheerful time for observers and theorizers than
the present; we are apt to think it the finest era of the world when
America was beginning to be discovered, when a bold sailor, even if he
were wrecked, might alight on a new kingdom; and about 1829 the dark
territories of Pathology were a fine America for a spirited young
adventurer.  Lydgate was ambitious above all to contribute towards
enlarging the scientific, rational basis of his profession.  The more
he became interested in special questions of disease, such as the
nature of fever or fevers, the more keenly he felt the need for that
fundamental knowledge of structure which just at the beginning of the
century had been illuminated by the brief and glorious career of
Bichat, who died when he was only one-and-thirty, but, like another
Alexander, left a realm large enough for many heirs.  That great
Frenchman first carried out the conception that living bodies,
fundamentally considered, are not associations of organs which can be
understood by studying them first apart, and then as it were federally;
but must be regarded as consisting of certain primary webs or tissues,
out of which the various organs--brain, heart, lungs, and so on--are
compacted, as the various accommodations of a house are built up in
various proportions of wood, iron, stone, brick, zinc, and the rest,
each material having its peculiar composition and proportions.  No man,
one sees, can understand and estimate the entire structure or its
parts--what are its frailties and what its repairs, without knowing the
nature of the materials.  And the conception wrought out by Bichat,
with his detailed study of the different tissues, acted necessarily on
medical questions as the turning of gas-light would act on a dim,
oil-lit street, showing new connections and hitherto hidden facts of
structure which must be taken into account in considering the symptoms
of maladies and the action of medicaments.  But results which depend on
human conscience and intelligence work slowly, and now at the end of
1829, most medical practice was still strutting or shambling along the
old paths, and there was still scientific work to be done which might
have seemed to be a direct sequence of Bichat's. This great seer did
not go beyond the consideration of the tissues as ultimate facts in the
living organism, marking the limit of anatomical analysis; but it was
open to another mind to say, have not these structures some common
basis from which they have all started, as your sarsnet, gauze, net,
satin, and velvet from the raw cocoon?  Here would be another light, as
of oxy-hydrogen, showing the very grain of things, and revising all
former explanations.  Of this sequence to Bichat's work, already
vibrating along many currents of the European mind, Lydgate was
enamoured; he longed to demonstrate the more intimate relations of
living structure, and help to define men's thought more accurately
after the true order.  The work had not yet been done, but only
prepared for those who knew how to use the preparation.  What was the
primitive tissue?  In that way Lydgate put the question--not quite in
the way required by the awaiting answer; but such missing of the right
word befalls many seekers.  And he counted on quiet intervals to be
watchfully seized, for taking up the threads of investigation--on many
hints to be won from diligent application, not only of the scalpel, but
of the microscope, which research had begun to use again with new
enthusiasm of reliance.  Such was Lydgate's plan of his future: to do
good small work for Middlemarch, and great work for the world.

He was certainly a happy fellow at this time: to be seven-and-twenty,
without any fixed vices, with a generous resolution that his action
should be beneficent, and with ideas in his brain that made life
interesting quite apart from the cultus of horseflesh and other mystic
rites of costly observance, which the eight hundred pounds left him
after buying his practice would certainly not have gone far in paying
for.  He was at a starting-point which makes many a man's career a fine
subject for betting, if there were any gentlemen given to that
amusement who could appreciate the complicated probabilities of an
arduous purpose, with all the possible thwartings and furtherings of
circumstance, all the niceties of inward balance, by which a man swims
and makes his point or else is carried headlong.  The risk would remain
even with close knowledge of Lydgate's character; for character too is
a process and an unfolding.  The man was still in the making, as much
as the Middlemarch doctor and immortal discoverer, and there were both
virtues and faults capable of shrinking or expanding.  The faults will
not, I hope, be a reason for the withdrawal of your interest in him.
Among our valued friends is there not some one or other who is a little
too self-confident and disdainful; whose distinguished mind is a little
spotted with commonness; who is a little pinched here and protuberant
there with native prejudices; or whose better energies are liable to
lapse down the wrong channel under the influence of transient
solicitations?  All these things might be alleged against Lydgate, but
then, they are the periphrases of a polite preacher, who talks of Adam,
and would not like to mention anything painful to the pew-renters.  The
particular faults from which these delicate generalities are distilled
have distinguishable physiognomies, diction, accent, and grimaces;
filling up parts in very various dramas.  Our vanities differ as our
noses do: all conceit is not the same conceit, but varies in
correspondence with the minutiae of mental make in which one of us
differs from another.  Lydgate's conceit was of the arrogant sort,
never simpering, never impertinent, but massive in its claims and
benevolently contemptuous.  He would do a great deal for noodles, being
sorry for them, and feeling quite sure that they could have no power
over him: he had thought of joining the Saint Simonians when he was in
Paris, in order to turn them against some of their own doctrines.  All
his faults were marked by kindred traits, and were those of a man who
had a fine baritone, whose clothes hung well upon him, and who even in
his ordinary gestures had an air of inbred distinction.  Where then lay
the spots of commonness? says a young lady enamoured of that careless
grace.  How could there be any commonness in a man so well-bred, so
ambitious of social distinction, so generous and unusual in his views
of social duty?  As easily as there may be stupidity in a man of genius
if you take him unawares on the wrong subject, or as many a man who has
the best will to advance the social millennium might be ill-inspired in
imagining its lighter pleasures; unable to go beyond Offenbach's music,
or the brilliant punning in the last burlesque.  Lydgate's spots of
commonness lay in the complexion of his prejudices, which, in spite of
noble intention and sympathy, were half of them such as are found in
ordinary men of the world: that distinction of mind which belonged to
his intellectual ardor, did not penetrate his feeling and judgment
about furniture, or women, or the desirability of its being known
(without his telling) that he was better born than other country
surgeons.  He did not mean to think of furniture at present; but
whenever he did so it was to be feared that neither biology nor schemes
of reform would lift him above the vulgarity of feeling that there
would be an incompatibility in his furniture not being of the best.

As to women, he had once already been drawn headlong by impetuous
folly, which he meant to be final, since marriage at some distant
period would of course not be impetuous.  For those who want to be
acquainted with Lydgate it will be good to know what was that case of
impetuous folly, for it may stand as an example of the fitful swerving
of passion to which he was prone, together with the chivalrous kindness
which helped to make him morally lovable.  The story can be told
without many words.  It happened when he was studying in Paris, and
just at the time when, over and above his other work, he was occupied
with some galvanic experiments.  One evening, tired with his
experimenting, and not being able to elicit the facts he needed, he
left his frogs and rabbits to some repose under their trying and
mysterious dispensation of unexplained shocks, and went to finish his
evening at the theatre of the Porte Saint Martin, where there was a
melodrama which he had already seen several times; attracted, not by
the ingenious work of the collaborating authors, but by an actress
whose part it was to stab her lover, mistaking him for the
evil-designing duke of the piece.  Lydgate was in love with this
actress, as a man is in love with a woman whom he never expects to
speak to.  She was a Provencale, with dark eyes, a Greek profile, and
rounded majestic form, having that sort of beauty which carries a sweet
matronliness even in youth, and her voice was a soft cooing.  She had
but lately come to Paris, and bore a virtuous reputation, her husband
acting with her as the unfortunate lover.  It was her acting which was
"no better than it should be," but the public was satisfied.  Lydgate's
only relaxation now was to go and look at this woman, just as he might
have thrown himself under the breath of the sweet south on a bank of
violets for a while, without prejudice to his galvanism, to which he
would presently return.  But this evening the old drama had a new
catastrophe.  At the moment when the heroine was to act the stabbing of
her lover, and he was to fall gracefully, the wife veritably stabbed
her husband, who fell as death willed.  A wild shriek pierced the
house, and the Provencale fell swooning: a shriek and a swoon were
demanded by the play, but the swooning too was real this time.  Lydgate
leaped and climbed, he hardly knew how, on to the stage, and was active
in help, making the acquaintance of his heroine by finding a contusion
on her head and lifting her gently in his arms.  Paris rang with the
story of this death:--was it a murder?  Some of the actress's warmest
admirers were inclined to believe in her guilt, and liked her the
better for it (such was the taste of those times); but Lydgate was not
one of these.  He vehemently contended for her innocence, and the
remote impersonal passion for her beauty which he had felt before, had
passed now into personal devotion, and tender thought of her lot.  The
notion of murder was absurd: no motive was discoverable, the young
couple being understood to dote on each other; and it was not
unprecedented that an accidental slip of the foot should have brought
these grave consequences.  The legal investigation ended in Madame
Laure's release.  Lydgate by this time had had many interviews with
her, and found her more and more adorable.  She talked little; but that
was an additional charm.  She was melancholy, and seemed grateful; her
presence was enough, like that of the evening light.  Lydgate was madly
anxious about her affection, and jealous lest any other man than
himself should win it and ask her to marry him.  But instead of
reopening her engagement at the Porte Saint Martin, where she would
have been all the more popular for the fatal episode, she left Paris
without warning, forsaking her little court of admirers.  Perhaps no
one carried inquiry far except Lydgate, who felt that all science had
come to a stand-still while he imagined the unhappy Laure, stricken by
ever-wandering sorrow, herself wandering, and finding no faithful
comforter.  Hidden actresses, however, are not so difficult to find as
some other hidden facts, and it was not long before Lydgate gathered
indications that Laure had taken the route to Lyons.  He found her at
last acting with great success at Avignon under the same name, looking
more majestic than ever as a forsaken wife carrying her child in her
arms.  He spoke to her after the play, was received with the usual
quietude which seemed to him beautiful as clear depths of water, and
obtained leave to visit her the next day; when he was bent on telling
her that he adored her, and on asking her to marry him.  He knew that
this was like the sudden impulse of a madman--incongruous even with his
habitual foibles.  No matter!  It was the one thing which he was
resolved to do.  He had two selves within him apparently, and they must
learn to accommodate each other and bear reciprocal impediments.
Strange, that some of us, with quick alternate vision, see beyond our
infatuations, and even while we rave on the heights, behold the wide
plain where our persistent self pauses and awaits us.

To have approached Laure with any suit that was not reverentially
tender would have been simply a contradiction of his whole feeling
towards her.

"You have come all the way from Paris to find me?" she said to him the
next day, sitting before him with folded arms, and looking at him with
eyes that seemed to wonder as an untamed ruminating animal wonders.
"Are all Englishmen like that?"

"I came because I could not live without trying to see you.  You are
lonely; I love you; I want you to consent to be my wife; I will wait,
but I want you to promise that you will marry me--no one else."

Laure looked at him in silence with a melancholy radiance from under
her grand eyelids, until he was full of rapturous certainty, and knelt
close to her knees.

"I will tell you something," she said, in her cooing way, keeping her
arms folded.  "My foot really slipped."

"I know, I know," said Lydgate, deprecatingly.  "It was a fatal
accident--a dreadful stroke of calamity that bound me to you the more."

Again Laure paused a little and then said, slowly, "_I meant to do it._"

Lydgate, strong man as he was, turned pale and trembled: moments seemed
to pass before he rose and stood at a distance from her.

"There was a secret, then," he said at last, even vehemently.  "He was
brutal to you: you hated him."

"No! he wearied me; he was too fond: he would live in Paris, and not in
my country; that was not agreeable to me."

"Great God!" said Lydgate, in a groan of horror.  "And you planned to
murder him?"

"I did not plan: it came to me in the play--_I meant to do it._"

Lydgate stood mute, and unconsciously pressed his hat on while he
looked at her.  He saw this woman--the first to whom he had given his
young adoration--amid the throng of stupid criminals.

"You are a good young man," she said.  "But I do not like husbands.  I
will never have another."

Three days afterwards Lydgate was at his galvanism again in his Paris
chambers, believing that illusions were at an end for him.  He was
saved from hardening effects by the abundant kindness of his heart and
his belief that human life might be made better.  But he had more
reason than ever for trusting his judgment, now that it was so
experienced; and henceforth he would take a strictly scientific view of
woman, entertaining no expectations but such as were justified
beforehand.

No one in Middlemarch was likely to have such a notion of Lydgate's
past as has here been faintly shadowed, and indeed the respectable
townsfolk there were not more given than mortals generally to any eager
attempt at exactness in the representation to themselves of what did
not come under their own senses.  Not only young virgins of that town,
but gray-bearded men also, were often in haste to conjecture how a new
acquaintance might be wrought into their purposes, contented with very
vague knowledge as to the way in which life had been shaping him for
that instrumentality.  Middlemarch, in fact, counted on swallowing
Lydgate and assimilating him very comfortably.

Q: Can you write an appropriate summary of the above paragraphs?
A:

completion: The chapter gives some background info on Mr. Lydgate. Even though no one in Middlemarch believes that he's really a better doctor than Dr. Sprague and Dr. Minchin, the two physicians, they can see that there's something uncommon about him. He was orphaned when he was just out of high school, and had been studying medicine practically since he could read. He's a surgeon, rather than a physician. Surgeons weren't looked up to as much as physicians, so Lydgate has to fight through his own lack of social standing, as well as traditional notions about medicine, if he wants to change anything about the medical practice in Middlemarch. We also learn that Lydgate fell in love with an actress while he was studying medicine in Paris. He went night after night to go see her play, in which she murders her husband . One night, she "accidentally" stabbed him for real, and Lydgate went to comfort her. Turns out, though, that she had done it on purpose, because he was starting to bore her. Lydgate was totally depressed by the news, and resolved never to fall in love again.


prompt:
Chapter: "All that in woman is adored
       In thy fair self I find--
     For the whole sex can but afford
       The handsome and the kind."
                        --SIR CHARLES SEDLEY.

The question whether Mr. Tyke should be appointed as salaried chaplain
to the hospital was an exciting topic to the Middlemarchers; and
Lydgate heard it discussed in a way that threw much light on the power
exercised in the town by Mr. Bulstrode.  The banker was evidently a
ruler, but there was an opposition party, and even among his supporters
there were some who allowed it to be seen that their support was a
compromise, and who frankly stated their impression that the general
scheme of things, and especially the casualties of trade, required you
to hold a candle to the devil.

Mr. Bulstrode's power was not due simply to his being a country banker,
who knew the financial secrets of most traders in the town and could
touch the springs of their credit; it was fortified by a beneficence
that was at once ready and severe--ready to confer obligations, and
severe in watching the result.  He had gathered, as an industrious man
always at his post, a chief share in administering the town charities,
and his private charities were both minute and abundant.  He would take
a great deal of pains about apprenticing Tegg the shoemaker's son, and
he would watch over Tegg's church-going; he would defend Mrs. Strype
the washerwoman against Stubbs's unjust exaction on the score of her
drying-ground, and he would himself scrutinize a calumny against Mrs.
Strype.  His private minor loans were numerous, but he would inquire
strictly into the circumstances both before and after.  In this way a
man gathers a domain in his neighbors' hope and fear as well as
gratitude; and power, when once it has got into that subtle region,
propagates itself, spreading out of all proportion to its external
means.  It was a principle with Mr. Bulstrode to gain as much power as
possible, that he might use it for the glory of God.  He went through a
great deal of spiritual conflict and inward argument in order to adjust
his motives, and make clear to himself what God's glory required.  But,
as we have seen, his motives were not always rightly appreciated.
There were many crass minds in Middlemarch whose reflective scales
could only weigh things in the lump; and they had a strong suspicion
that since Mr. Bulstrode could not enjoy life in their fashion, eating
and drinking so little as he did, and worreting himself about
everything, he must have a sort of vampire's feast in the sense of
mastery.

The subject of the chaplaincy came up at Mr. Vincy's table when Lydgate
was dining there, and the family connection with Mr. Bulstrode did not,
he observed, prevent some freedom of remark even on the part of the
host himself, though his reasons against the proposed arrangement
turned entirely on his objection to Mr. Tyke's sermons, which were all
doctrine, and his preference for Mr. Farebrother, whose sermons were
free from that taint.  Mr. Vincy liked well enough the notion of the
chaplain's having a salary, supposing it were given to Farebrother, who
was as good a little fellow as ever breathed, and the best preacher
anywhere, and companionable too.

"What line shall you take, then?" said Mr. Chichely, the coroner, a
great coursing comrade of Mr. Vincy's.

"Oh, I'm precious glad I'm not one of the Directors now.  I shall vote
for referring the matter to the Directors and the Medical Board
together.  I shall roll some of my responsibility on your shoulders,
Doctor," said Mr. Vincy, glancing first at Dr. Sprague, the senior
physician of the town, and then at Lydgate who sat opposite.  "You
medical gentlemen must consult which sort of black draught you will
prescribe, eh, Mr. Lydgate?"

"I know little of either," said Lydgate; "but in general, appointments
are apt to be made too much a question of personal liking.  The fittest
man for a particular post is not always the best fellow or the most
agreeable.  Sometimes, if you wanted to get a reform, your only way
would be to pension off the good fellows whom everybody is fond of, and
put them out of the question."

Dr. Sprague, who was considered the physician of most "weight," though
Dr. Minchin was usually said to have more "penetration," divested his
large heavy face of all expression, and looked at his wine-glass while
Lydgate was speaking.  Whatever was not problematical and suspected
about this young man--for example, a certain showiness as to foreign
ideas, and a disposition to unsettle what had been settled and
forgotten by his elders--was positively unwelcome to a physician whose
standing had been fixed thirty years before by a treatise on
Meningitis, of which at least one copy marked "own" was bound in calf.
For my part I have some fellow-feeling with Dr. Sprague: one's
self-satisfaction is an untaxed kind of property which it is very
unpleasant to find deprecated.

Lydgate's remark, however, did not meet the sense of the company.  Mr.
Vincy said, that if he could have _his_ way, he would not put
disagreeable fellows anywhere.

"Hang your reforms!" said Mr. Chichely.  "There's no greater humbug in
the world.  You never hear of a reform, but it means some trick to put
in new men.  I hope you are not one of the 'Lancet's' men, Mr.
Lydgate--wanting to take the coronership out of the hands of the legal
profession: your words appear to point that way."

"I disapprove of Wakley," interposed Dr. Sprague, "no man more: he is
an ill-intentioned fellow, who would sacrifice the respectability of
the profession, which everybody knows depends on the London Colleges,
for the sake of getting some notoriety for himself.  There are men who
don't mind about being kicked blue if they can only get talked about.
But Wakley is right sometimes," the Doctor added, judicially.  "I could
mention one or two points in which Wakley is in the right."

"Oh, well," said Mr. Chichely, "I blame no man for standing up in favor
of his own cloth; but, coming to argument, I should like to know how a
coroner is to judge of evidence if he has not had a legal training?"

"In my opinion," said Lydgate, "legal training only makes a man more
incompetent in questions that require knowledge a of another kind.
People talk about evidence as if it could really be weighed in scales
by a blind Justice.  No man can judge what is good evidence on any
particular subject, unless he knows that subject well.  A lawyer is no
better than an old woman at a post-mortem examination.  How is he to
know the action of a poison?  You might as well say that scanning verse
will teach you to scan the potato crops."

"You are aware, I suppose, that it is not the coroner's business to
conduct the post-mortem, but only to take the evidence of the medical
witness?" said Mr. Chichely, with some scorn.

"Who is often almost as ignorant as the coroner himself," said Lydgate.
"Questions of medical jurisprudence ought not to be left to the chance
of decent knowledge in a medical witness, and the coroner ought not to
be a man who will believe that strychnine will destroy the coats of the
stomach if an ignorant practitioner happens to tell him so."

Lydgate had really lost sight of the fact that Mr. Chichely was his
Majesty's coroner, and ended innocently with the question, "Don't you
agree with me, Dr. Sprague?"

"To a certain extent--with regard to populous districts, and in the
metropolis," said the Doctor.  "But I hope it will be long before this
part of the country loses the services of my friend Chichely, even
though it might get the best man in our profession to succeed him.  I
am sure Vincy will agree with me."

"Yes, yes, give me a coroner who is a good coursing man," said Mr.
Vincy, jovially.  "And in my opinion, you're safest with a lawyer.
Nobody can know everything. Most things are 'visitation of God.' And as
to poisoning, why, what you want to know is the law. Come, shall we
join the ladies?"

Lydgate's private opinion was that Mr. Chichely might be the very
coroner without bias as to the coats of the stomach, but he had not
meant to be personal.  This was one of the difficulties of moving in
good Middlemarch society: it was dangerous to insist on knowledge as a
qualification for any salaried office.  Fred Vincy had called Lydgate a
prig, and now Mr. Chichely was inclined to call him prick-eared;
especially when, in the drawing-room, he seemed to be making himself
eminently agreeable to Rosamond, whom he had easily monopolized in a
tete-a-tete, since Mrs. Vincy herself sat at the tea-table. She
resigned no domestic function to her daughter; and the matron's
blooming good-natured face, with the two volatile pink strings floating
from her fine throat, and her cheery manners to husband and children,
was certainly among the great attractions of the Vincy
house--attractions which made it all the easier to fall in love with
the daughter.  The tinge of unpretentious, inoffensive vulgarity in
Mrs. Vincy gave more effect to Rosamond's refinement, which was beyond
what Lydgate had expected.

Certainly, small feet and perfectly turned shoulders aid the impression
of refined manners, and the right thing said seems quite astonishingly
right when it is accompanied with exquisite curves of lip and eyelid.
And Rosamond could say the right thing; for she was clever with that
sort of cleverness which catches every tone except the humorous.
Happily she never attempted to joke, and this perhaps was the most
decisive mark of her cleverness.

She and Lydgate readily got into conversation.  He regretted that he
had not heard her sing the other day at Stone Court.  The only pleasure
he allowed himself during the latter part of his stay in Paris was to
go and hear music.

"You have studied music, probably?" said Rosamond.

"No, I know the notes of many birds, and I know many melodies by ear;
but the music that I don't know at all, and have no notion about,
delights me--affects me.  How stupid the world is that it does not make
more use of such a pleasure within its reach!"

"Yes, and you will find Middlemarch very tuneless.  There are hardly
any good musicians.  I only know two gentlemen who sing at all well."

"I suppose it is the fashion to sing comic songs in a rhythmic way,
leaving you to fancy the tune--very much as if it were tapped on a
drum?"

"Ah, you have heard Mr. Bowyer," said Rosamond, with one of her rare
smiles.  "But we are speaking very ill of our neighbors."

Lydgate was almost forgetting that he must carry on the conversation,
in thinking how lovely this creature was, her garment seeming to be
made out of the faintest blue sky, herself so immaculately blond, as if
the petals of some gigantic flower had just opened and disclosed her;
and yet with this infantine blondness showing so much ready,
self-possessed grace.  Since he had had the memory of Laure, Lydgate
had lost all taste for large-eyed silence: the divine cow no longer
attracted him, and Rosamond was her very opposite.  But he recalled
himself.

"You will let me hear some music to-night, I hope."

"I will let you hear my attempts, if you like," said Rosamond.  "Papa
is sure to insist on my singing.  But I shall tremble before you, who
have heard the best singers in Paris.  I have heard very little: I have
only once been to London.  But our organist at St. Peter's is a good
musician, and I go on studying with him."

"Tell me what you saw in London."

"Very little."  (A more naive girl would have said, "Oh, everything!"
But Rosamond knew better.) "A few of the ordinary sights, such as raw
country girls are always taken to."

"Do you call yourself a raw country girl?" said Lydgate, looking at her
with an involuntary emphasis of admiration, which made Rosamond blush
with pleasure.  But she remained simply serious, turned her long neck a
little, and put up her hand to touch her wondrous hair-plaits--an
habitual gesture with her as pretty as any movements of a kitten's paw.
Not that Rosamond was in the least like a kitten: she was a sylph
caught young and educated at Mrs. Lemon's.

"I assure you my mind is raw," she said immediately; "I pass at
Middlemarch.  I am not afraid of talking to our old neighbors.  But I
am really afraid of you."

"An accomplished woman almost always knows more than we men, though her
knowledge is of a different sort.  I am sure you could teach me a
thousand things--as an exquisite bird could teach a bear if there were
any common language between them.  Happily, there is a common language
between women and men, and so the bears can get taught."

"Ah, there is Fred beginning to strum!  I must go and hinder him from
jarring all your nerves," said Rosamond, moving to the other side of
the room, where Fred having opened the piano, at his father's desire,
that Rosamond might give them some music, was parenthetically
performing "Cherry Ripe!" with one hand.  Able men who have passed
their examinations will do these things sometimes, not less than the
plucked Fred.

"Fred, pray defer your practising till to-morrow; you will make Mr.
Lydgate ill," said Rosamond.  "He has an ear."

Fred laughed, and went on with his tune to the end.

Rosamond turned to Lydgate, smiling gently, and said, "You perceive,
the bears will not always be taught."

"Now then, Rosy!" said Fred, springing from the stool and twisting it
upward for her, with a hearty expectation of enjoyment.  "Some good
rousing tunes first."

Rosamond played admirably.  Her master at Mrs. Lemon's school (close to
a county town with a memorable history that had its relics in church
and castle) was one of those excellent musicians here and there to be
found in our provinces, worthy to compare with many a noted
Kapellmeister in a country which offers more plentiful conditions of
musical celebrity.  Rosamond, with the executant's instinct, had seized
his manner of playing, and gave forth his large rendering of noble
music with the precision of an echo.  It was almost startling, heard
for the first time.  A hidden soul seemed to be flowing forth from
Rosamond's fingers; and so indeed it was, since souls live on in
perpetual echoes, and to all fine expression there goes somewhere an
originating activity, if it be only that of an interpreter.  Lydgate
was taken possession of, and began to believe in her as something
exceptional.  After all, he thought, one need not be surprised to find
the rare conjunctions of nature under circumstances apparently
unfavorable: come where they may, they always depend on conditions that
are not obvious.  He sat looking at her, and did not rise to pay her
any compliments, leaving that to others, now that his admiration was
deepened.

Her singing was less remarkable, but also well trained, and sweet to
hear as a chime perfectly in tune.  It is true she sang "Meet me by
moonlight," and "I've been roaming"; for mortals must share the
fashions of their time, and none but the ancients can be always
classical.  But Rosamond could also sing "Black-eyed Susan" with
effect, or Haydn's canzonets, or "Voi, che sapete," or "Batti,
batti"--she only wanted to know what her audience liked.

Her father looked round at the company, delighting in their admiration.
Her mother sat, like a Niobe before her troubles, with her youngest
little girl on her lap, softly beating the child's hand up and down in
time to the music.  And Fred, notwithstanding his general scepticism
about Rosy, listened to her music with perfect allegiance, wishing he
could do the same thing on his flute.  It was the pleasantest family
party that Lydgate had seen since he came to Middlemarch.  The Vincys
had the readiness to enjoy, the rejection of all anxiety, and the
belief in life as a merry lot, which made a house exceptional in most
county towns at that time, when Evangelicalism had cast a certain
suspicion as of plague-infection over the few amusements which survived
in the provinces.  At the Vincys' there was always whist, and the
card-tables stood ready now, making some of the company secretly
impatient of the music.  Before it ceased Mr. Farebrother came in--a
handsome, broad-chested but otherwise small man, about forty, whose
black was very threadbare: the brilliancy was all in his quick gray
eyes.  He came like a pleasant change in the light, arresting little
Louisa with fatherly nonsense as she was being led out of the room by
Miss Morgan, greeting everybody with some special word, and seeming to
condense more talk into ten minutes than had been held all through the
evening.  He claimed from Lydgate the fulfilment of a promise to come
and see him.  "I can't let you off, you know, because I have some
beetles to show you.  We collectors feel an interest in every new man
till he has seen all we have to show him."

But soon he swerved to the whist-table, rubbing his hands and saying,
"Come now, let us be serious!  Mr. Lydgate? not play?  Ah! you are too
young and light for this kind of thing."

Lydgate said to himself that the clergyman whose abilities were so
painful to Mr. Bulstrode, appeared to have found an agreeable resort in
this certainly not erudite household.  He could half understand it: the
good-humor, the good looks of elder and younger, and the provision for
passing the time without any labor of intelligence, might make the
house beguiling to people who had no particular use for their odd hours.

Everything looked blooming and joyous except Miss Morgan, who was
brown, dull, and resigned, and altogether, as Mrs. Vincy often said,
just the sort of person for a governess.  Lydgate did not mean to pay
many such visits himself.  They were a wretched waste of the evenings;
and now, when he had talked a little more to Rosamond, he meant to
excuse himself and go.

"You will not like us at Middlemarch, I feel sure," she said, when the
whist-players were settled.  "We are very stupid, and you have been
used to something quite different."

"I suppose all country towns are pretty much alike," said Lydgate.
"But I have noticed that one always believes one's own town to be more
stupid than any other.  I have made up my mind to take Middlemarch as
it comes, and shall be much obliged if the town will take me in the
same way.  I have certainly found some charms in it which are much
greater than I had expected."

"You mean the rides towards Tipton and Lowick; every one is pleased
with those," said Rosamond, with simplicity.

"No, I mean something much nearer to me."

Rosamond rose and reached her netting, and then said, "Do you care
about dancing at all?  I am not quite sure whether clever men ever
dance."

"I would dance with you if you would allow me."

"Oh!" said Rosamond, with a slight deprecatory laugh.  "I was only
going to say that we sometimes have dancing, and I wanted to know
whether you would feel insulted if you were asked to come."

"Not on the condition I mentioned."

After this chat Lydgate thought that he was going, but on moving
towards the whist-tables, he got interested in watching Mr.
Farebrother's play, which was masterly, and also his face, which was a
striking mixture of the shrewd and the mild.  At ten o'clock supper was
brought in (such were the customs of Middlemarch) and there was
punch-drinking; but Mr. Farebrother had only a glass of water.  He was
winning, but there seemed to be no reason why the renewal of rubbers
should end, and Lydgate at last took his leave.

But as it was not eleven o'clock, he chose to walk in the brisk air
towards the tower of St. Botolph's, Mr. Farebrother's church, which
stood out dark, square, and massive against the starlight.  It was the
oldest church in Middlemarch; the living, however, was but a vicarage
worth barely four hundred a-year. Lydgate had heard that, and he
wondered now whether Mr. Farebrother cared about the money he won at
cards; thinking, "He seems a very pleasant fellow, but Bulstrode may
have his good reasons."  Many things would be easier to Lydgate if it
should turn out that Mr. Bulstrode was generally justifiable.  "What is
his religious doctrine to me, if he carries some good notions along
with it?  One must use such brains as are to be found."

These were actually Lydgate's first meditations as he walked away from
Mr. Vincy's, and on this ground I fear that many ladies will consider
him hardly worthy of their attention.  He thought of Rosamond and her
music only in the second place; and though, when her turn came, he
dwelt on the image of her for the rest of his walk, he felt no
agitation, and had no sense that any new current had set into his life.
He could not marry yet; he wished not to marry for several years; and
therefore he was not ready to entertain the notion of being in love
with a girl whom he happened to admire.  He did admire Rosamond
exceedingly; but that madness which had once beset him about Laure was
not, he thought, likely to recur in relation to any other woman.
Certainly, if falling in love had been at all in question, it would
have been quite safe with a creature like this Miss Vincy, who had just
the kind of intelligence one would desire in a woman--polished,
refined, docile, lending itself to finish in all the delicacies of
life, and enshrined in a body which expressed this with a force of
demonstration that excluded the need for other evidence.  Lydgate felt
sure that if ever he married, his wife would have that feminine
radiance, that distinctive womanhood which must be classed with flowers
and music, that sort of beauty which by its very nature was virtuous,
being moulded only for pure and delicate joys.

But since he did not mean to marry for the next five years--his more
pressing business was to look into Louis' new book on Fever, which he
was specially interested in, because he had known Louis in Paris, and
had followed many anatomical demonstrations in order to ascertain the
specific differences of typhus and typhoid.  He went home and read far
into the smallest hour, bringing a much more testing vision of details
and relations into this pathological study than he had ever thought it
necessary to apply to the complexities of love and marriage, these
being subjects on which he felt himself amply informed by literature,
and that traditional wisdom which is handed down in the genial
conversation of men.  Whereas Fever had obscure conditions, and gave
him that delightful labor of the imagination which is not mere
arbitrariness, but the exercise of disciplined power--combining and
constructing with the clearest eye for probabilities and the fullest
obedience to knowledge; and then, in yet more energetic alliance with
impartial Nature, standing aloof to invent tests by which to try its
own work.

Many men have been praised as vividly imaginative on the strength of
their profuseness in indifferent drawing or cheap narration:--reports
of very poor talk going on in distant orbs; or portraits of Lucifer
coming down on his bad errands as a large ugly man with bat's wings and
spurts of phosphorescence; or exaggerations of wantonness that seem to
reflect life in a diseased dream.  But these kinds of inspiration
Lydgate regarded as rather vulgar and vinous compared with the
imagination that reveals subtle actions inaccessible by any sort of
lens, but tracked in that outer darkness through long pathways of
necessary sequence by the inward light which is the last refinement of
Energy, capable of bathing even the ethereal atoms in its ideally
illuminated space.  He for his part had tossed away all cheap
inventions where ignorance finds itself able and at ease: he was
enamoured of that arduous invention which is the very eye of research,
provisionally framing its object and correcting it to more and more
exactness of relation; he wanted to pierce the obscurity of those
minute processes which prepare human misery and joy, those invisible
thoroughfares which are the first lurking-places of anguish, mania, and
crime, that delicate poise and transition which determine the growth of
happy or unhappy consciousness.

As he threw down his book, stretched his legs towards the embers in the
grate, and clasped his hands at the back of his head, in that agreeable
afterglow of excitement when thought lapses from examination of a
specific object into a suffusive sense of its connections with all the
rest of our existence--seems, as it were, to throw itself on its back
after vigorous swimming and float with the repose of unexhausted
strength--Lydgate felt a triumphant delight in his studies, and
something like pity for those less lucky men who were not of his
profession.

"If I had not taken that turn when I was a lad," he thought, "I might
have got into some stupid draught-horse work or other, and lived always
in blinkers.  I should never have been happy in any profession that did
not call forth the highest intellectual strain, and yet keep me in good
warm contact with my neighbors.  There is nothing like the medical
profession for that: one can have the exclusive scientific life that
touches the distance and befriend the old fogies in the parish too.  It
is rather harder for a clergyman: Farebrother seems to be an anomaly."

This last thought brought back the Vincys and all the pictures of the
evening.  They floated in his mind agreeably enough, and as he took up
his bed-candle his lips were curled with that incipient smile which is
apt to accompany agreeable recollections.  He was an ardent fellow, but
at present his ardor was absorbed in love of his work and in the
ambition of making his life recognized as a factor in the better life
of mankind--like other heroes of science who had nothing but an obscure
country practice to begin with.

Poor Lydgate! or shall I say, Poor Rosamond!  Each lived in a world of
which the other knew nothing.  It had not occurred to Lydgate that he
had been a subject of eager meditation to Rosamond, who had neither any
reason for throwing her marriage into distant perspective, nor any
pathological studies to divert her mind from that ruminating habit,
that inward repetition of looks, words, and phrases, which makes a
large part in the lives of most girls.  He had not meant to look at her
or speak to her with more than the inevitable amount of admiration and
compliment which a man must give to a beautiful girl; indeed, it seemed
to him that his enjoyment of her music had remained almost silent, for
he feared falling into the rudeness of telling her his great surprise
at her possession of such accomplishment.  But Rosamond had registered
every look and word, and estimated them as the opening incidents of a
preconceived romance--incidents which gather value from the foreseen
development and climax.  In Rosamond's romance it was not necessary to
imagine much about the inward life of the hero, or of his serious
business in the world: of course, he had a profession and was clever,
as well as sufficiently handsome; but the piquant fact about Lydgate
was his good birth, which distinguished him from all Middlemarch
admirers, and presented marriage as a prospect of rising in rank and
getting a little nearer to that celestial condition on earth in which
she would have nothing to do with vulgar people, and perhaps at last
associate with relatives quite equal to the county people who looked
down on the Middlemarchers.  It was part of Rosamond's cleverness to
discern very subtly the faintest aroma of rank, and once when she had
seen the Miss Brookes accompanying their uncle at the county assizes,
and seated among the aristocracy, she had envied them, notwithstanding
their plain dress.

If you think it incredible that to imagine Lydgate as a man of family
could cause thrills of satisfaction which had anything to do with the
sense that she was in love with him, I will ask you to use your power
of comparison a little more effectively, and consider whether red cloth
and epaulets have never had an influence of that sort.  Our passions do
not live apart in locked chambers, but, dressed in their small wardrobe
of notions, bring their provisions to a common table and mess together,
feeding out of the common store according to their appetite.

Rosamond, in fact, was entirely occupied not exactly with Tertius
Lydgate as he was in himself, but with his relation to her; and it was
excusable in a girl who was accustomed to hear that all young men
might, could, would be, or actually were in love with her, to believe
at once that Lydgate could be no exception.  His looks and words meant
more to her than other men's, because she cared more for them: she
thought of them diligently, and diligently attended to that perfection
of appearance, behavior, sentiments, and all other elegancies, which
would find in Lydgate a more adequate admirer than she had yet been
conscious of.

For Rosamond, though she would never do anything that was disagreeable
to her, was industrious; and now more than ever she was active in
sketching her landscapes and market-carts and portraits of friends, in
practising her music, and in being from morning till night her own
standard of a perfect lady, having always an audience in her own
consciousness, with sometimes the not unwelcome addition of a more
variable external audience in the numerous visitors of the house.  She
found time also to read the best novels, and even the second best, and
she knew much poetry by heart.  Her favorite poem was "Lalla Rookh."

"The best girl in the world!  He will be a happy fellow who gets her!"
was the sentiment of the elderly gentlemen who visited the Vincys; and
the rejected young men thought of trying again, as is the fashion in
country towns where the horizon is not thick with coming rivals.  But
Mrs. Plymdale thought that Rosamond had been educated to a ridiculous
pitch, for what was the use of accomplishments which would be all laid
aside as soon as she was married?  While her aunt Bulstrode, who had a
sisterly faithfulness towards her brother's family, had two sincere
wishes for Rosamond--that she might show a more serious turn of mind,
and that she might meet with a husband whose wealth corresponded to her
habits.

Q: Can you write an appropriate summary of the above paragraphs?
A:

completion: Lydgate and various other Middlemarchers are having dinner at the Vincys' house. The subject of who would be the chaplain of the new fever hospital comes up at dinner. The matter will be decided by a vote from the board of directors, and Lydgate remarks that stuff like that is too often decided by popularity, instead of by who's the best person for the job. After dinner, Rosamond and Lydgate have a chat in the drawing room about music and such, and then Rosamond is called upon to sing to the whole group. Mr. Farebrother arrives just as a lot of the group is about to sit down to play whist . He's a threadbare, unmarried forty-year-old vicar. Lydgate likes him, but doesn't like that he plays whist for money. The truth of the matter, though, is that Mr. Farebrother needs the money that he makes at cards to help support his old mother and aunt, who live with him. Lydgate leaves the dinner party convinced that he's not actually in love with Rosamond - after all, he doesn't have enough money to support a wife, and he has his career to consider. Rosamond, though, is thoroughly convinced that Lydgate must be in love with her , and is obsessed with the idea of marrying him and visiting his fancy relatives.


prompt:
Chapter: "The clerkly person smiled and said
     Promise was a pretty maid,
     But being poor she died unwed."

The Rev. Camden Farebrother, whom Lydgate went to see the next evening,
lived in an old parsonage, built of stone, venerable enough to match
the church which it looked out upon.  All the furniture too in the
house was old, but with another grade of age--that of Mr. Farebrother's
father and grandfather.  There were painted white chairs, with gilding
and wreaths on them, and some lingering red silk damask with slits in
it.  There were engraved portraits of Lord Chancellors and other
celebrated lawyers of the last century; and there were old pier-glasses
to reflect them, as well as the little satin-wood tables and the sofas
resembling a prolongation of uneasy chairs, all standing in relief
against the dark wainscot. This was the physiognomy of the drawing-room
into which Lydgate was shown; and there were three ladies to receive
him, who were also old-fashioned, and of a faded but genuine
respectability: Mrs. Farebrother, the Vicar's white-haired mother,
befrilled and kerchiefed with dainty cleanliness, upright, quick-eyed,
and still under seventy; Miss Noble, her sister, a tiny old lady of
meeker aspect, with frills and kerchief decidedly more worn and mended;
and Miss Winifred Farebrother, the Vicar's elder sister, well-looking
like himself, but nipped and subdued as single women are apt to be who
spend their lives in uninterrupted subjection to their elders.  Lydgate
had not expected to see so quaint a group: knowing simply that Mr.
Farebrother was a bachelor, he had thought of being ushered into a
snuggery where the chief furniture would probably be books and
collections of natural objects.  The Vicar himself seemed to wear
rather a changed aspect, as most men do when acquaintances made
elsewhere see them for the first time in their own homes; some indeed
showing like an actor of genial parts disadvantageously cast for the
curmudgeon in a new piece.  This was not the case with Mr. Farebrother:
he seemed a trifle milder and more silent, the chief talker being his
mother, while he only put in a good-humored moderating remark here and
there.  The old lady was evidently accustomed to tell her company what
they ought to think, and to regard no subject as quite safe without her
steering.  She was afforded leisure for this function by having all her
little wants attended to by Miss Winifred.  Meanwhile tiny Miss Noble
carried on her arm a small basket, into which she diverted a bit of
sugar, which she had first dropped in her saucer as if by mistake;
looking round furtively afterwards, and reverting to her teacup with a
small innocent noise as of a tiny timid quadruped.  Pray think no ill
of Miss Noble.  That basket held small savings from her more portable
food, destined for the children of her poor friends among whom she
trotted on fine mornings; fostering and petting all needy creatures
being so spontaneous a delight to her, that she regarded it much as if
it had been a pleasant vice that she was addicted to.  Perhaps she was
conscious of being tempted to steal from those who had much that she
might give to those who had nothing, and carried in her conscience the
guilt of that repressed desire.  One must be poor to know the luxury of
giving!

Mrs. Farebrother welcomed the guest with a lively formality and
precision.  She presently informed him that they were not often in want
of medical aid in that house.  She had brought up her children to wear
flannel and not to over-eat themselves, which last habit she considered
the chief reason why people needed doctors.  Lydgate pleaded for those
whose fathers and mothers had over-eaten themselves, but Mrs.
Farebrother held that view of things dangerous: Nature was more just
than that; it would be easy for any felon to say that his ancestors
ought to have been hanged instead of him.  If those who had bad fathers
and mothers were bad themselves, they were hanged for that.  There was
no need to go back on what you couldn't see.

"My mother is like old George the Third," said the Vicar, "she objects
to metaphysics."

"I object to what is wrong, Camden.  I say, keep hold of a few plain
truths, and make everything square with them.  When I was young, Mr.
Lydgate, there never was any question about right and wrong.  We knew
our catechism, and that was enough; we learned our creed and our duty.
Every respectable Church person had the same opinions.  But now, if you
speak out of the Prayer-book itself, you are liable to be contradicted."

"That makes rather a pleasant time of it for those who like to maintain
their own point," said Lydgate.

"But my mother always gives way," said the Vicar, slyly.

"No, no, Camden, you must not lead Mr. Lydgate into a mistake about
_me_. I shall never show that disrespect to my parents, to give up what
they taught me.  Any one may see what comes of turning.  If you change
once, why not twenty times?"

"A man might see good arguments for changing once, and not see them for
changing again," said Lydgate, amused with the decisive old lady.

"Excuse me there.  If you go upon arguments, they are never wanting,
when a man has no constancy of mind.  My father never changed, and he
preached plain moral sermons without arguments, and was a good man--few
better.  When you get me a good man made out of arguments, I will get
you a good dinner with reading you the cookery-book. That's my opinion,
and I think anybody's stomach will bear me out."

"About the dinner certainly, mother," said Mr. Farebrother.

"It is the same thing, the dinner or the man.  I am nearly seventy, Mr.
Lydgate, and I go upon experience.  I am not likely to follow new
lights, though there are plenty of them here as elsewhere.  I say, they
came in with the mixed stuffs that will neither wash nor wear.  It was
not so in my youth: a Churchman was a Churchman, and a clergyman, you
might be pretty sure, was a gentleman, if nothing else.  But now he may
be no better than a Dissenter, and want to push aside my son on
pretence of doctrine.  But whoever may wish to push him aside, I am
proud to say, Mr. Lydgate, that he will compare with any preacher in
this kingdom, not to speak of this town, which is but a low standard to
go by; at least, to my thinking, for I was born and bred at Exeter."

"A mother is never partial," said Mr. Farebrother, smiling.  "What do
you think Tyke's mother says about him?"

"Ah, poor creature! what indeed?" said Mrs. Farebrother, her sharpness
blunted for the moment by her confidence in maternal judgments.  "She
says the truth to herself, depend upon it."

"And what is the truth?" said Lydgate. "I am curious to know."

"Oh, nothing bad at all," said Mr. Farebrother.  "He is a zealous
fellow: not very learned, and not very wise, I think--because I don't
agree with him."

"Why, Camden!" said Miss Winifred, "Griffin and his wife told me only
to-day, that Mr. Tyke said they should have no more coals if they came
to hear you preach."

Mrs. Farebrother laid down her knitting, which she had resumed after
her small allowance of tea and toast, and looked at her son as if to
say "You hear that?"  Miss Noble said, "Oh poor things! poor things!"
in reference, probably, to the double loss of preaching and coal.  But
the Vicar answered quietly--

"That is because they are not my parishioners.  And I don't think my
sermons are worth a load of coals to them."

"Mr. Lydgate," said Mrs. Farebrother, who could not let this pass, "you
don't know my son: he always undervalues himself.  I tell him he is
undervaluing the God who made him, and made him a most excellent
preacher."

"That must be a hint for me to take Mr. Lydgate away to my study,
mother," said the Vicar, laughing.  "I promised to show you my
collection," he added, turning to Lydgate; "shall we go?"

All three ladies remonstrated.  Mr. Lydgate ought not to be hurried
away without being allowed to accept another cup of tea: Miss Winifred
had abundance of good tea in the pot.  Why was Camden in such haste to
take a visitor to his den?  There was nothing but pickled vermin, and
drawers full of blue-bottles and moths, with no carpet on the floor.
Mr. Lydgate must excuse it.  A game at cribbage would be far better.
In short, it was plain that a vicar might be adored by his womankind as
the king of men and preachers, and yet be held by them to stand in much
need of their direction.  Lydgate, with the usual shallowness of a
young bachelor, wondered that Mr. Farebrother had not taught them
better.

"My mother is not used to my having visitors who can take any interest
in my hobbies," said the Vicar, as he opened the door of his study,
which was indeed as bare of luxuries for the body as the ladies had
implied, unless a short porcelain pipe and a tobacco-box were to be
excepted.

"Men of your profession don't generally smoke," he said.  Lydgate
smiled and shook his head.  "Nor of mine either, properly, I suppose.
You will hear that pipe alleged against me by Bulstrode and Company.
They don't know how pleased the devil would be if I gave it up."

"I understand.  You are of an excitable temper and want a sedative.  I
am heavier, and should get idle with it.  I should rush into idleness,
and stagnate there with all my might."

"And you mean to give it all to your work.  I am some ten or twelve
years older than you, and have come to a compromise.  I feed a weakness
or two lest they should get clamorous.  See," continued the Vicar,
opening several small drawers, "I fancy I have made an exhaustive study
of the entomology of this district.  I am going on both with the fauna
and flora; but I have at least done my insects well.  We are singularly
rich in orthoptera: I don't know whether--Ah! you have got hold of that
glass jar--you are looking into that instead of my drawers.  You don't
really care about these things?"

"Not by the side of this lovely anencephalous monster.  I have never
had time to give myself much to natural history.  I was early bitten
with an interest in structure, and it is what lies most directly in my
profession.  I have no hobby besides.  I have the sea to swim in there."

"Ah! you are a happy fellow," said Mr. Farebrother, turning on his heel
and beginning to fill his pipe.  "You don't know what it is to want
spiritual tobacco--bad emendations of old texts, or small items about a
variety of Aphis Brassicae, with the well-known signature of
Philomicron, for the 'Twaddler's Magazine;' or a learned treatise on
the entomology of the Pentateuch, including all the insects not
mentioned, but probably met with by the Israelites in their passage
through the desert; with a monograph on the Ant, as treated by Solomon,
showing the harmony of the Book of Proverbs with the results of modern
research.  You don't mind my fumigating you?"

Lydgate was more surprised at the openness of this talk than at its
implied meaning--that the Vicar felt himself not altogether in the
right vocation.  The neat fitting-up of drawers and shelves, and the
bookcase filled with expensive illustrated books on Natural History,
made him think again of the winnings at cards and their destination.
But he was beginning to wish that the very best construction of
everything that Mr. Farebrother did should be the true one.  The
Vicar's frankness seemed not of the repulsive sort that comes from an
uneasy consciousness seeking to forestall the judgment of others, but
simply the relief of a desire to do with as little pretence as
possible.  Apparently he was not without a sense that his freedom of
speech might seem premature, for he presently said--

"I have not yet told you that I have the advantage of you, Mr. Lydgate,
and know you better than you know me.  You remember Trawley who shared
your apartment at Paris for some time?  I was a correspondent of his,
and he told me a good deal about you.  I was not quite sure when you
first came that you were the same man.  I was very glad when I found
that you were.  Only I don't forget that you have not had the like
prologue about me."

Lydgate divined some delicacy of feeling here, but did not half
understand it.  "By the way," he said, "what has become of Trawley?  I
have quite lost sight of him.  He was hot on the French social systems,
and talked of going to the Backwoods to found a sort of Pythagorean
community.  Is he gone?"

"Not at all.  He is practising at a German bath, and has married a rich
patient."

"Then my notions wear the best, so far," said Lydgate, with a short
scornful laugh.  "He would have it, the medical profession was an
inevitable system of humbug.  I said, the fault was in the men--men who
truckle to lies and folly.  Instead of preaching against humbug outside
the walls, it might be better to set up a disinfecting apparatus
within.  In short--I am reporting my own conversation--you may be sure
I had all the good sense on my side."

"Your scheme is a good deal more difficult to carry out than the
Pythagorean community, though.  You have not only got the old Adam in
yourself against you, but you have got all those descendants of the
original Adam who form the society around you.  You see, I have paid
twelve or thirteen years more than you for my knowledge of
difficulties.  But"--Mr. Farebrother broke off a moment, and then
added, "you are eying that glass vase again.  Do you want to make an
exchange?  You shall not have it without a fair barter."

"I have some sea-mice--fine specimens--in spirits.  And I will throw in
Robert Brown's new thing--'Microscopic Observations on the Pollen of
Plants'--if you don't happen to have it already."

"Why, seeing how you long for the monster, I might ask a higher price.
Suppose I ask you to look through my drawers and agree with me about
all my new species?"  The Vicar, while he talked in this way,
alternately moved about with his pipe in his mouth, and returned to
hang rather fondly over his drawers.  "That would be good discipline,
you know, for a young doctor who has to please his patients in
Middlemarch.  You must learn to be bored, remember.  However, you shall
have the monster on your own terms."

"Don't you think men overrate the necessity for humoring everybody's
nonsense, till they get despised by the very fools they humor?" said
Lydgate, moving to Mr. Farebrother's side, and looking rather absently
at the insects ranged in fine gradation, with names subscribed in
exquisite writing.  "The shortest way is to make your value felt, so
that people must put up with you whether you flatter them or not."

"With all my heart.  But then you must be sure of having the value, and
you must keep yourself independent.  Very few men can do that.  Either
you slip out of service altogether, and become good for nothing, or you
wear the harness and draw a good deal where your yoke-fellows pull you.
But do look at these delicate orthoptera!"

Lydgate had after all to give some scrutiny to each drawer, the Vicar
laughing at himself, and yet persisting in the exhibition.

"Apropos of what you said about wearing harness," Lydgate began, after
they had sat down, "I made up my mind some time ago to do with as
little of it as possible. That was why I determined not to try anything
in London, for a good many years at least.  I didn't like what I saw
when I was studying there--so much empty bigwiggism, and obstructive
trickery.  In the country, people have less pretension to knowledge,
and are less of companions, but for that reason they affect one's
amour-propre less: one makes less bad blood, and can follow one's own
course more quietly."

"Yes--well--you have got a good start; you are in the right profession,
the work you feel yourself most fit for.  Some people miss that, and
repent too late.  But you must not be too sure of keeping your
independence."

"You mean of family ties?" said Lydgate, conceiving that these might
press rather tightly on Mr. Farebrother.

"Not altogether.  Of course they make many things more difficult.  But
a good wife--a good unworldly woman--may really help a man, and keep
him more independent.  There's a parishioner of mine--a fine fellow,
but who would hardly have pulled through as he has done without his
wife.  Do you know the Garths?  I think they were not Peacock's
patients."

"No; but there is a Miss Garth at old Featherstone's, at Lowick."

"Their daughter: an excellent girl."

"She is very quiet--I have hardly noticed her."

"She has taken notice of you, though, depend upon it."

"I don't understand," said Lydgate; he could hardly say "Of course."

"Oh, she gauges everybody.  I prepared her for confirmation--she is a
favorite of mine."

Mr. Farebrother puffed a few moments in silence, Lydgate not caring to
know more about the Garths.  At last the Vicar laid down his pipe,
stretched out his legs, and turned his bright eyes with a smile towards
Lydgate, saying--

"But we Middlemarchers are not so tame as you take us to be.  We have
our intrigues and our parties.  I am a party man, for example, and
Bulstrode is another.  If you vote for me you will offend Bulstrode."

"What is there against Bulstrode?" said Lydgate, emphatically.

"I did not say there was anything against him except that.  If you vote
against him you will make him your enemy."

"I don't know that I need mind about that," said Lydgate, rather
proudly; "but he seems to have good ideas about hospitals, and he
spends large sums on useful public objects.  He might help me a good
deal in carrying out my ideas.  As to his religious notions--why, as
Voltaire said, incantations will destroy a flock of sheep if
administered with a certain quantity of arsenic.  I look for the man
who will bring the arsenic, and don't mind about his incantations."

"Very good.  But then you must not offend your arsenic-man. You will
not offend me, you know," said Mr. Farebrother, quite unaffectedly.  "I
don't translate my own convenience into other people's duties.  I am
opposed to Bulstrode in many ways.  I don't like the set he belongs to:
they are a narrow ignorant set, and do more to make their neighbors
uncomfortable than to make them better.  Their system is a sort of
worldly-spiritual cliqueism: they really look on the rest of mankind as
a doomed carcass which is to nourish them for heaven.  But," he added,
smilingly, "I don't say that Bulstrode's new hospital is a bad thing;
and as to his wanting to oust me from the old one--why, if he thinks me
a mischievous fellow, he is only returning a compliment.  And I am not
a model clergyman--only a decent makeshift."

Lydgate was not at all sure that the Vicar maligned himself.  A model
clergyman, like a model doctor, ought to think his own profession the
finest in the world, and take all knowledge as mere nourishment to his
moral pathology and therapeutics.  He only said, "What reason does
Bulstrode give for superseding you?"

"That I don't teach his opinions--which he calls spiritual religion;
and that I have no time to spare.  Both statements are true.  But then
I could make time, and I should be glad of the forty pounds.  That is
the plain fact of the case.  But let us dismiss it.  I only wanted to
tell you that if you vote for your arsenic-man, you are not to cut me
in consequence.  I can't spare you.  You are a sort of circumnavigator
come to settle among us, and will keep up my belief in the antipodes.
Now tell me all about them in Paris."

Q: Can you write an appropriate summary of the above paragraphs?
A:

completion: The chapter opens with a description of Mr. Farebrother's vicarage . Lydgate arrives to pay Mr. Farebrother a visit. Farebrother lives with his mother and his mother's unmarried sister. His mother is opinionated and talkative, and her sister, Miss Noble, is a timid woman who loves stashing her sugar into a basket to give to poor children later, instead of putting it in her tea. They are discussing different kinds of preaching, and the subject of Mr. Tyke comes up - Tyke is the man that Mr. Bulstrode wants to appoint as the chaplain of the new hospital instead of Mr. Farebrother. Apparently some of Mr. Tyke's parishioners have been coming to hear Mr. Farebrother, instead, and Mr. Tyke is jealous and angry about it. After a while, Mr. Farebrother invites Lydgate into his study to see his collection of bottled insects, bones, and other natural specimens. Lydgate quickly realizes that Farebrother ought to have been a scientist, rather than a vicar - he's not "in the right profession" . The two of them go back and forth between discussing biology and discussing professional ethics - whether it's better to stay entirely independent, or to humor people to some extent to keep them from turning against you. The subject then turns to Mr. Bulstrode, and Mr. Farebrother frankly says that he doesn't care for Mr. Bulstrode's religion or politics. Bulstrode, he says, thinks that the rest of the world is doomed for hellfire and damnation, and does more to make the people around him uncomfortable than to make them better people. Lydgate doesn't care much about Bulstrode's religious notions, so long as he's willing to fund the new hospital, which is, after all, needed. Farebrother openly says that Lydgate shouldn't worry about offending him by voting for Tyke as the chaplain of the new hospital. Farebrother could use the increased salary, but if Lydgate votes against Bulstrode's wishes, he'll be in trouble, himself. And Bulstrode is a bad enemy to have in Middlemarch.