Chapter: 1st Gent. How class your man?--as better than the most,
                 Or, seeming better, worse beneath that cloak?
                 As saint or knave, pilgrim or hypocrite?
    2d Gent.  Nay, tell me how you class your wealth of books
                 The drifted relics of all time.
                 As well sort them at once by size and livery:
                 Vellum, tall copies, and the common calf
                 Will hardly cover more diversity
                 Than all your labels cunningly devised
                 To class your unread authors.


In consequence of what he had heard from Fred, Mr. Vincy determined to
speak with Mr. Bulstrode in his private room at the Bank at half-past
one, when he was usually free from other callers.  But a visitor had
come in at one o'clock, and Mr. Bulstrode had so much to say to him,
that there was little chance of the interview being over in half an
hour.  The banker's speech was fluent, but it was also copious, and he
used up an appreciable amount of time in brief meditative pauses.  Do
not imagine his sickly aspect to have been of the yellow, black-haired
sort: he had a pale blond skin, thin gray-besprinkled brown hair,
light-gray eyes, and a large forehead.  Loud men called his subdued
tone an undertone, and sometimes implied that it was inconsistent with
openness; though there seems to be no reason why a loud man should not
be given to concealment of anything except his own voice, unless it can
be shown that Holy Writ has placed the seat of candor in the lungs.
Mr. Bulstrode had also a deferential bending attitude in listening, and
an apparently fixed attentiveness in his eyes which made those persons
who thought themselves worth hearing infer that he was seeking the
utmost improvement from their discourse.  Others, who expected to make
no great figure, disliked this kind of moral lantern turned on them.
If you are not proud of your cellar, there is no thrill of satisfaction
in seeing your guest hold up his wine-glass to the light and look
judicial.  Such joys are reserved for conscious merit.  Hence Mr.
Bulstrode's close attention was not agreeable to the publicans and
sinners in Middlemarch; it was attributed by some to his being a
Pharisee, and by others to his being Evangelical.  Less superficial
reasoners among them wished to know who his father and grandfather
were, observing that five-and-twenty years ago nobody had ever heard of
a Bulstrode in Middlemarch.  To his present visitor, Lydgate, the
scrutinizing look was a matter of indifference: he simply formed an
unfavorable opinion of the banker's constitution, and concluded that he
had an eager inward life with little enjoyment of tangible things.

"I shall be exceedingly obliged if you will look in on me here
occasionally, Mr. Lydgate," the banker observed, after a brief pause.
"If, as I dare to hope, I have the privilege of finding you a valuable
coadjutor in the interesting matter of hospital management, there will
be many questions which we shall need to discuss in private.  As to the
new hospital, which is nearly finished, I shall consider what you have
said about the advantages of the special destination for fevers.  The
decision will rest with me, for though Lord Medlicote has given the
land and timber for the building, he is not disposed to give his
personal attention to the object."

"There are few things better worth the pains in a provincial town like
this," said Lydgate.  "A fine fever hospital in addition to the old
infirmary might be the nucleus of a medical school here, when once we
get our medical reforms; and what would do more for medical education
than the spread of such schools over the country?  A born provincial
man who has a grain of public spirit as well as a few ideas, should do
what he can to resist the rush of everything that is a little better
than common towards London.  Any valid professional aims may often find
a freer, if not a richer field, in the provinces."

One of Lydgate's gifts was a voice habitually deep and sonorous, yet
capable of becoming very low and gentle at the right moment.  About his
ordinary bearing there was a certain fling, a fearless expectation of
success, a confidence in his own powers and integrity much fortified by
contempt for petty obstacles or seductions of which he had had no
experience.  But this proud openness was made lovable by an expression
of unaffected good-will. Mr. Bulstrode perhaps liked him the better for
the difference between them in pitch and manners; he certainly liked
him the better, as Rosamond did, for being a stranger in Middlemarch.
One can begin so many things with a new person!--even begin to be a
better man.

"I shall rejoice to furnish your zeal with fuller opportunities," Mr.
Bulstrode answered; "I mean, by confiding to you the superintendence of
my new hospital, should a maturer knowledge favor that issue, for I am
determined that so great an object shall not be shackled by our two
physicians.  Indeed, I am encouraged to consider your advent to this
town as a gracious indication that a more manifest blessing is now to
be awarded to my efforts, which have hitherto been much with stood.
With regard to the old infirmary, we have gained the initial point--I
mean your election.  And now I hope you will not shrink from incurring
a certain amount of jealousy and dislike from your professional
brethren by presenting yourself as a reformer."

"I will not profess bravery," said Lydgate, smiling, "but I acknowledge
a good deal of pleasure in fighting, and I should not care for my
profession, if I did not believe that better methods were to be found
and enforced there as well as everywhere else."

"The standard of that profession is low in Middlemarch, my dear sir,"
said the banker.  "I mean in knowledge and skill; not in social status,
for our medical men are most of them connected with respectable
townspeople here.  My own imperfect health has induced me to give some
attention to those palliative resources which the divine mercy has
placed within our reach.  I have consulted eminent men in the
metropolis, and I am painfully aware of the backwardness under which
medical treatment labors in our provincial districts."

"Yes;--with our present medical rules and education, one must be
satisfied now and then to meet with a fair practitioner.  As to all the
higher questions which determine the starting-point of a diagnosis--as
to the philosophy of medical evidence--any glimmering of these can only
come from a scientific culture of which country practitioners have
usually no more notion than the man in the moon."

Mr. Bulstrode, bending and looking intently, found the form which
Lydgate had given to his agreement not quite suited to his
comprehension.  Under such circumstances a judicious man changes the
topic and enters on ground where his own gifts may be more useful.

"I am aware," he said, "that the peculiar bias of medical ability is
towards material means.  Nevertheless, Mr. Lydgate, I hope we shall not
vary in sentiment as to a measure in which you are not likely to be
actively concerned, but in which your sympathetic concurrence may be an
aid to me.  You recognize, I hope; the existence of spiritual interests
in your patients?"

"Certainly I do.  But those words are apt to cover different meanings
to different minds."

"Precisely.  And on such subjects wrong teaching is as fatal as no
teaching.  Now a point which I have much at heart to secure is a new
regulation as to clerical attendance at the old infirmary.  The
building stands in Mr. Farebrother's parish.  You know Mr. Farebrother?"

"I have seen him.  He gave me his vote.  I must call to thank him.  He
seems a very bright pleasant little fellow.  And I understand he is a
naturalist."

"Mr. Farebrother, my dear sir, is a man deeply painful to contemplate.
I suppose there is not a clergyman in this country who has greater
talents."  Mr. Bulstrode paused and looked meditative.

"I have not yet been pained by finding any excessive talent in
Middlemarch," said Lydgate, bluntly.

"What I desire," Mr. Bulstrode continued, looking still more serious,
"is that Mr. Farebrother's attendance at the hospital should be
superseded by the appointment of a chaplain--of Mr. Tyke, in fact--and
that no other spiritual aid should be called in."

"As a medical man I could have no opinion on such a point unless I knew
Mr. Tyke, and even then I should require to know the cases in which he
was applied."  Lydgate smiled, but he was bent on being circumspect.

"Of course you cannot enter fully into the merits of this measure at
present.  But"--here Mr. Bulstrode began to speak with a more chiselled
emphasis--"the subject is likely to be referred to the medical board of
the infirmary, and what I trust I may ask of you is, that in virtue of
the cooperation between us which I now look forward to, you will not,
so far as you are concerned, be influenced by my opponents in this
matter."

"I hope I shall have nothing to do with clerical disputes," said
Lydgate.  "The path I have chosen is to work well in my own profession."

"My responsibility, Mr. Lydgate, is of a broader kind.  With me,
indeed, this question is one of sacred accountableness; whereas with my
opponents, I have good reason to say that it is an occasion for
gratifying a spirit of worldly opposition.  But I shall not therefore
drop one iota of my convictions, or cease to identify myself with that
truth which an evil generation hates.  I have devoted myself to this
object of hospital-improvement, but I will boldly confess to you, Mr.
Lydgate, that I should have no interest in hospitals if I believed that
nothing more was concerned therein than the cure of mortal diseases.  I
have another ground of action, and in the face of persecution I will
not conceal it."

Mr. Bulstrode's voice had become a loud and agitated whisper as he said
the last words.

"There we certainly differ," said Lydgate.  But he was not sorry that
the door was now opened, and Mr. Vincy was announced.  That florid
sociable personage was become more interesting to him since he had seen
Rosamond.  Not that, like her, he had been weaving any future in which
their lots were united; but a man naturally remembers a charming girl
with pleasure, and is willing to dine where he may see her again.
Before he took leave, Mr. Vincy had given that invitation which he had
been "in no hurry about," for Rosamond at breakfast had mentioned that
she thought her uncle Featherstone had taken the new doctor into great
favor.

Mr. Bulstrode, alone with his brother-in-law, poured himself out a
glass of water, and opened a sandwich-box.

"I cannot persuade you to adopt my regimen, Vincy?"

"No, no; I've no opinion of that system.  Life wants padding," said Mr.
Vincy, unable to omit his portable theory.  "However," he went on,
accenting the word, as if to dismiss all irrelevance, "what I came here
to talk about was a little affair of my young scapegrace, Fred's."

"That is a subject on which you and I are likely to take quite as
different views as on diet, Vincy."

"I hope not this time."  (Mr. Vincy was resolved to be good-humored.)
"The fact is, it's about a whim of old Featherstone's. Somebody has
been cooking up a story out of spite, and telling it to the old man, to
try to set him against Fred.  He's very fond of Fred, and is likely to
do something handsome for him; indeed he has as good as told Fred that
he means to leave him his land, and that makes other people jealous."

"Vincy, I must repeat, that you will not get any concurrence from me as
to the course you have pursued with your eldest son.  It was entirely
from worldly vanity that you destined him for the Church: with a family
of three sons and four daughters, you were not warranted in devoting
money to an expensive education which has succeeded in nothing but in
giving him extravagant idle habits.  You are now reaping the
consequences."

To point out other people's errors was a duty that Mr. Bulstrode rarely
shrank from, but Mr. Vincy was not equally prepared to be patient.
When a man has the immediate prospect of being mayor, and is ready, in
the interests of commerce, to take up a firm attitude on politics
generally, he has naturally a sense of his importance to the framework
of things which seems to throw questions of private conduct into the
background.  And this particular reproof irritated him more than any
other.  It was eminently superfluous to him to be told that he was
reaping the consequences.  But he felt his neck under Bulstrode's yoke;
and though he usually enjoyed kicking, he was anxious to refrain from
that relief.

"As to that, Bulstrode, it's no use going back.  I'm not one of your
pattern men, and I don't pretend to be.  I couldn't foresee everything
in the trade; there wasn't a finer business in Middlemarch than ours,
and the lad was clever.  My poor brother was in the Church, and would
have done well--had got preferment already, but that stomach fever took
him off: else he might have been a dean by this time.  I think I was
justified in what I tried to do for Fred.  If you come to religion, it
seems to me a man shouldn't want to carve out his meat to an ounce
beforehand:--one must trust a little to Providence and be generous.
It's a good British feeling to try and raise your family a little: in
my opinion, it's a father's duty to give his sons a fine chance."

"I don't wish to act otherwise than as your best friend, Vincy, when I
say that what you have been uttering just now is one mass of
worldliness and inconsistent folly."

"Very well," said Mr. Vincy, kicking in spite of resolutions, "I never
professed to be anything but worldly; and, what's more, I don't see
anybody else who is not worldly.  I suppose you don't conduct business
on what you call unworldly principles.  The only difference I see is
that one worldliness is a little bit honester than another."

"This kind of discussion is unfruitful, Vincy," said Mr. Bulstrode,
who, finishing his sandwich, had thrown himself back in his chair, and
shaded his eyes as if weary.  "You had some more particular business."

"Yes, yes.  The long and short of it is, somebody has told old
Featherstone, giving you as the authority, that Fred has been borrowing
or trying to borrow money on the prospect of his land.  Of course you
never said any such nonsense.  But the old fellow will insist on it
that Fred should bring him a denial in your handwriting; that is, just
a bit of a note saying you don't believe a word of such stuff, either
of his having borrowed or tried to borrow in such a fool's way.  I
suppose you can have no objection to do that."

"Pardon me.  I have an objection.  I am by no means sure that your son,
in his recklessness and ignorance--I will use no severer word--has not
tried to raise money by holding out his future prospects, or even that
some one may not have been foolish enough to supply him on so vague a
presumption: there is plenty of such lax money-lending as of other
folly in the world."

"But Fred gives me his honor that he has never borrowed money on the
pretence of any understanding about his uncle's land.  He is not a
liar.  I don't want to make him better than he is.  I have blown him up
well--nobody can say I wink at what he does.  But he is not a liar.
And I should have thought--but I may be wrong--that there was no
religion to hinder a man from believing the best of a young fellow,
when you don't know worse.  It seems to me it would be a poor sort of
religion to put a spoke in his wheel by refusing to say you don't
believe such harm of him as you've got no good reason to believe."

"I am not at all sure that I should be befriending your son by
smoothing his way to the future possession of Featherstone's property.
I cannot regard wealth as a blessing to those who use it simply as a
harvest for this world.  You do not like to hear these things, Vincy,
but on this occasion I feel called upon to tell you that I have no
motive for furthering such a disposition of property as that which you
refer to.  I do not shrink from saying that it will not tend to your
son's eternal welfare or to the glory of God.  Why then should you
expect me to pen this kind of affidavit, which has no object but to
keep up a foolish partiality and secure a foolish bequest?"

"If you mean to hinder everybody from having money but saints and
evangelists, you must give up some profitable partnerships, that's all
I can say," Mr. Vincy burst out very bluntly.  "It may be for the glory
of God, but it is not for the glory of the Middlemarch trade, that
Plymdale's house uses those blue and green dyes it gets from the
Brassing manufactory; they rot the silk, that's all I know about it.
Perhaps if other people knew so much of the profit went to the glory of
God, they might like it better.  But I don't mind so much about that--I
could get up a pretty row, if I chose."

Mr. Bulstrode paused a little before he answered.  "You pain me very
much by speaking in this way, Vincy.  I do not expect you to understand
my grounds of action--it is not an easy thing even to thread a path for
principles in the intricacies of the world--still less to make the
thread clear for the careless and the scoffing.  You must remember, if
you please, that I stretch my tolerance towards you as my wife's
brother, and that it little becomes you to complain of me as
withholding material help towards the worldly position of your family.
I must remind you that it is not your own prudence or judgment that has
enabled you to keep your place in the trade."

"Very likely not; but you have been no loser by my trade yet," said Mr.
Vincy, thoroughly nettled (a result which was seldom much retarded by
previous resolutions). "And when you married Harriet, I don't see how
you could expect that our families should not hang by the same nail.
If you've changed your mind, and want my family to come down in the
world, you'd better say so.  I've never changed; I'm a plain Churchman
now, just as I used to be before doctrines came up.  I take the world
as I find it, in trade and everything else.  I'm contented to be no
worse than my neighbors.  But if you want us to come down in the world,
say so.  I shall know better what to do then."

"You talk unreasonably.  Shall you come down in the world for want of
this letter about your son?"

"Well, whether or not, I consider it very unhandsome of you to refuse
it.  Such doings may be lined with religion, but outside they have a
nasty, dog-in-the-manger look.  You might as well slander Fred: it
comes pretty near to it when you refuse to say you didn't set a slander
going.  It's this sort of thing--this tyrannical spirit, wanting to
play bishop and banker everywhere--it's this sort of thing makes a
man's name stink."

"Vincy, if you insist on quarrelling with me, it will be exceedingly
painful to Harriet as well as myself," said Mr. Bulstrode, with a
trifle more eagerness and paleness than usual.

"I don't want to quarrel.  It's for my interest--and perhaps for yours
too--that we should be friends.  I bear you no grudge; I think no worse
of you than I do of other people.  A man who half starves himself, and
goes the length in family prayers, and so on, that you do, believes in
his religion whatever it may be: you could turn over your capital just
as fast with cursing and swearing:--plenty of fellows do.  You like to
be master, there's no denying that; you must be first chop in heaven,
else you won't like it much.  But you're my sister's husband, and we
ought to stick together; and if I know Harriet, she'll consider it your
fault if we quarrel because you strain at a gnat in this way, and
refuse to do Fred a good turn.  And I don't mean to say I shall bear it
well.  I consider it unhandsome."

Mr. Vincy rose, began to button his great-coat, and looked steadily at
his brother-in-law, meaning to imply a demand for a decisive answer.

This was not the first time that Mr. Bulstrode had begun by admonishing
Mr. Vincy, and had ended by seeing a very unsatisfactory reflection of
himself in the course unflattering mirror which that manufacturer's
mind presented to the subtler lights and shadows of his fellow-men; and
perhaps his experience ought to have warned him how the scene would
end.  But a full-fed fountain will be generous with its waters even in
the rain, when they are worse than useless; and a fine fount of
admonition is apt to be equally irrepressible.

It was not in Mr. Bulstrode's nature to comply directly in consequence
of uncomfortable suggestions.  Before changing his course, he always
needed to shape his motives and bring them into accordance with his
habitual standard.  He said, at last--

"I will reflect a little, Vincy.  I will mention the subject to
Harriet.  I shall probably send you a letter."

"Very well.  As soon as you can, please.  I hope it will all be settled
before I see you to-morrow."



    "Follows here the strict receipt
     For that sauce to dainty meat,
     Named Idleness, which many eat
     By preference, and call it sweet:
     First watch for morsels, like a hound
     Mix well with buffets, stir them round
     With good thick oil of flatteries,
     And froth with mean self-lauding lies.
     Serve warm: the vessels you must choose
     To keep it in are dead men's shoes."


Mr. Bulstrode's consultation of Harriet seemed to have had the effect
desired by Mr. Vincy, for early the next morning a letter came which
Fred could carry to Mr. Featherstone as the required testimony.

The old gentleman was staying in bed on account of the cold weather,
and as Mary Garth was not to be seen in the sitting-room, Fred went
up-stairs immediately and presented the letter to his uncle, who,
propped up comfortably on a bed-rest, was not less able than usual to
enjoy his consciousness of wisdom in distrusting and frustrating
mankind.  He put on his spectacles to read the letter, pursing up his
lips and drawing down their corners.

"Under the circumstances I will not decline to state my
conviction--tchah! what fine words the fellow puts!  He's as fine as an
auctioneer--that your son Frederic has not obtained any advance of
money on bequests promised by Mr. Featherstone--promised? who said I
had ever promised?  I promise nothing--I shall make codicils as long as
I like--and that considering the nature of such a proceeding, it is
unreasonable to presume that a young man of sense and character would
attempt it--ah, but the gentleman doesn't say you are a young man of
sense and character, mark you that, sir!--As to my own concern with any
report of such a nature, I distinctly affirm that I never made any
statement to the effect that your son had borrowed money on any
property that might accrue to him on Mr. Featherstone's demise--bless
my heart! 'property'--accrue--demise!  Lawyer Standish is nothing to
him.  He couldn't speak finer if he wanted to borrow.  Well," Mr.
Featherstone here looked over his spectacles at Fred, while he handed
back the letter to him with a contemptuous gesture, "you don't suppose
I believe a thing because Bulstrode writes it out fine, eh?"

Fred colored.  "You wished to have the letter, sir.  I should think it
very likely that Mr. Bulstrode's denial is as good as the authority
which told you what he denies."

"Every bit.  I never said I believed either one or the other.  And now
what d' you expect?" said Mr. Featherstone, curtly, keeping on his
spectacles, but withdrawing his hands under his wraps.

"I expect nothing, sir."  Fred with difficulty restrained himself from
venting his irritation.  "I came to bring you the letter.  If you like
I will bid you good morning."

"Not yet, not yet.  Ring the bell; I want missy to come."

It was a servant who came in answer to the bell.

"Tell missy to come!" said Mr. Featherstone, impatiently.  "What
business had she to go away?"  He spoke in the same tone when Mary came.

"Why couldn't you sit still here till I told you to go? I want my
waistcoat now.  I told you always to put it on the bed."

Mary's eyes looked rather red, as if she had been crying.  It was clear
that Mr. Featherstone was in one of his most snappish humors this
morning, and though Fred had now the prospect of receiving the
much-needed present of money, he would have preferred being free to
turn round on the old tyrant and tell him that Mary Garth was too good
to be at his beck.  Though Fred had risen as she entered the room, she
had barely noticed him, and looked as if her nerves were quivering with
the expectation that something would be thrown at her.  But she never
had anything worse than words to dread.  When she went to reach the
waistcoat from a peg, Fred went up to her and said, "Allow me."

"Let it alone!  You bring it, missy, and lay it down here," said Mr.
Featherstone.  "Now you go away again till I call you," he added, when
the waistcoat was laid down by him.  It was usual with him to season
his pleasure in showing favor to one person by being especially
disagreeable to another, and Mary was always at hand to furnish the
condiment.  When his own relatives came she was treated better.  Slowly
he took out a bunch of keys from the waistcoat pocket, and slowly he
drew forth a tin box which was under the bed-clothes.

"You expect I am going to give you a little fortune, eh?" he said,
looking above his spectacles and pausing in the act of opening the lid.

"Not at all, sir.  You were good enough to speak of making me a present
the other day, else, of course, I should not have thought of the
matter."  But Fred was of a hopeful disposition, and a vision had
presented itself of a sum just large enough to deliver him from a
certain anxiety.  When Fred got into debt, it always seemed to him
highly probable that something or other--he did not necessarily
conceive what--would come to pass enabling him to pay in due time.  And
now that the providential occurrence was apparently close at hand, it
would have been sheer absurdity to think that the supply would be short
of the need: as absurd as a faith that believed in half a miracle for
want of strength to believe in a whole one.

The deep-veined hands fingered many bank-notes-one after the other,
laying them down flat again, while Fred leaned back in his chair,
scorning to look eager.  He held himself to be a gentleman at heart,
and did not like courting an old fellow for his money.  At last, Mr.
Featherstone eyed him again over his spectacles and presented him with
a little sheaf of notes: Fred could see distinctly that there were but
five, as the less significant edges gaped towards him.  But then, each
might mean fifty pounds.  He took them, saying--

"I am very much obliged to you, sir," and was going to roll them up
without seeming to think of their value.  But this did not suit Mr.
Featherstone, who was eying him intently.

"Come, don't you think it worth your while to count 'em?  You take
money like a lord; I suppose you lose it like one."

"I thought I was not to look a gift-horse in the mouth, sir.  But I
shall be very happy to count them."

Fred was not so happy, however, after he had counted them.  For they
actually presented the absurdity of being less than his hopefulness had
decided that they must be.  What can the fitness of things mean, if not
their fitness to a man's expectations?  Failing this, absurdity and
atheism gape behind him.  The collapse for Fred was severe when he
found that he held no more than five twenties, and his share in the
higher education of this country did not seem to help him.
Nevertheless he said, with rapid changes in his fair complexion--

"It is very handsome of you, sir."

"I should think it is," said Mr. Featherstone, locking his box and
replacing it, then taking off his spectacles deliberately, and at
length, as if his inward meditation had more deeply convinced him,
repeating, "I should think it handsome."

"I assure you, sir, I am very grateful," said Fred, who had had time to
recover his cheerful air.

"So you ought to be.  You want to cut a figure in the world, and I
reckon Peter Featherstone is the only one you've got to trust to." Here
the old man's eyes gleamed with a curiously mingled satisfaction in the
consciousness that this smart young fellow relied upon him, and that
the smart young fellow was rather a fool for doing so.

"Yes, indeed: I was not born to very splendid chances.  Few men have
been more cramped than I have been," said Fred, with some sense of
surprise at his own virtue, considering how hardly he was dealt with.
"It really seems a little too bad to have to ride a broken-winded
hunter, and see men, who, are not half such good judges as yourself,
able to throw away any amount of money on buying bad bargains."

"Well, you can buy yourself a fine hunter now.  Eighty pound is enough
for that, I reckon--and you'll have twenty pound over to get yourself
out of any little scrape," said Mr. Featherstone, chuckling slightly.

"You are very good, sir," said Fred, with a fine sense of contrast
between the words and his feeling.

"Ay, rather a better uncle than your fine uncle Bulstrode.  You won't
get much out of his spekilations, I think.  He's got a pretty strong
string round your father's leg, by what I hear, eh?"

"My father never tells me anything about his affairs, sir."

"Well, he shows some sense there.  But other people find 'em out
without his telling.  _He'll_ never have much to leave you: he'll
most-like die without a will--he's the sort of man to do it--let 'em
make him mayor of Middlemarch as much as they like.  But you won't get
much by his dying without a will, though you _are_ the eldest son."

Fred thought that Mr. Featherstone had never been so disagreeable
before.  True, he had never before given him quite so much money at
once.

"Shall I destroy this letter of Mr. Bulstrode's, sir?" said Fred,
rising with the letter as if he would put it in the fire.

"Ay, ay, I don't want it.  It's worth no money to me."

Fred carried the letter to the fire, and thrust the poker through it
with much zest.  He longed to get out of the room, but he was a little
ashamed before his inner self, as well as before his uncle, to run away
immediately after pocketing the money.  Presently, the farm-bailiff
came up to give his master a report, and Fred, to his unspeakable
relief, was dismissed with the injunction to come again soon.

He had longed not only to be set free from his uncle, but also to find
Mary Garth.  She was now in her usual place by the fire, with sewing in
her hands and a book open on the little table by her side.  Her eyelids
had lost some of their redness now, and she had her usual air of
self-command.

"Am I wanted up-stairs?" she said, half rising as Fred entered.

"No; I am only dismissed, because Simmons is gone up."

Mary sat down again, and resumed her work.  She was certainly treating
him with more indifference than usual: she did not know how
affectionately indignant he had felt on her behalf up-stairs.

"May I stay here a little, Mary, or shall I bore you?"

"Pray sit down," said Mary; "you will not be so heavy a bore as Mr.
John Waule, who was here yesterday, and he sat down without asking my
leave."

"Poor fellow!  I think he is in love with you."

"I am not aware of it.  And to me it is one of the most odious things
in a girl's life, that there must always be some supposition of falling
in love coming between her and any man who is kind to her, and to whom
she is grateful.  I should have thought that I, at least, might have
been safe from all that.  I have no ground for the nonsensical vanity
of fancying everybody who comes near me is in love with me."

Mary did not mean to betray any feeling, but in spite of herself she
ended in a tremulous tone of vexation.

"Confound John Waule!  I did not mean to make you angry.  I didn't know
you had any reason for being grateful to me.  I forgot what a great
service you think it if any one snuffs a candle for you."  Fred also had
his pride, and was not going to show that he knew what had called forth
this outburst of Mary's.

"Oh, I am not angry, except with the ways of the world.  I do like to
be spoken to as if I had common-sense. I really often feel as if I
could understand a little more than I ever hear even from young
gentlemen who have been to college."  Mary had recovered, and she spoke
with a suppressed rippling under-current of laughter pleasant to hear.

"I don't care how merry you are at my expense this morning," said Fred,
"I thought you looked so sad when you came up-stairs. It is a shame you
should stay here to be bullied in that way."

"Oh, I have an easy life--by comparison.  I have tried being a teacher,
and I am not fit for that: my mind is too fond of wandering on its own
way.  I think any hardship is better than pretending to do what one is
paid for, and never really doing it.  Everything here I can do as well
as any one else could; perhaps better than some--Rosy, for example.
Though she is just the sort of beautiful creature that is imprisoned
with ogres in fairy tales."

"_Rosy!_" cried Fred, in a tone of profound brotherly scepticism.

"Come, Fred!" said Mary, emphatically; "you have no right to be so
critical."

"Do you mean anything particular--just now?"

"No, I mean something general--always."

"Oh, that I am idle and extravagant.  Well, I am not fit to be a poor
man.  I should not have made a bad fellow if I had been rich."

"You would have done your duty in that state of life to which it has
not pleased God to call you," said Mary, laughing.

"Well, I couldn't do my duty as a clergyman, any more than you could do
yours as a governess.  You ought to have a little fellow-feeling there,
Mary."

"I never said you ought to be a clergyman.  There are other sorts of
work.  It seems to me very miserable not to resolve on some course and
act accordingly."

"So I could, if--" Fred broke off, and stood up, leaning against the
mantel-piece.

"If you were sure you should not have a fortune?"

"I did not say that.  You want to quarrel with me.  It is too bad of
you to be guided by what other people say about me."

"How can I want to quarrel with you?  I should be quarrelling with all
my new books," said Mary, lifting the volume on the table.  "However
naughty you may be to other people, you are good to me."

"Because I like you better than any one else.  But I know you despise
me."

"Yes, I do--a little," said Mary, nodding, with a smile.

"You would admire a stupendous fellow, who would have wise opinions
about everything."

"Yes, I should."  Mary was sewing swiftly, and seemed provokingly
mistress of the situation.  When a conversation has taken a wrong turn
for us, we only get farther and farther into the swamp of awkwardness.
This was what Fred Vincy felt.

"I suppose a woman is never in love with any one she has always
known--ever since she can remember; as a man often is.  It is always
some new fellow who strikes a girl."

"Let me see," said Mary, the corners of her mouth curling archly; "I
must go back on my experience.  There is Juliet--she seems an example
of what you say.  But then Ophelia had probably known Hamlet a long
while; and Brenda Troil--she had known Mordaunt Merton ever since they
were children; but then he seems to have been an estimable young man;
and Minna was still more deeply in love with Cleveland, who was a
stranger.  Waverley was new to Flora MacIvor; but then she did not fall
in love with him.  And there are Olivia and Sophia Primrose, and
Corinne--they may be said to have fallen in love with new men.
Altogether, my experience is rather mixed."

Mary looked up with some roguishness at Fred, and that look of hers was
very dear to him, though the eyes were nothing more than clear windows
where observation sat laughingly.  He was certainly an affectionate
fellow, and as he had grown from boy to man, he had grown in love with
his old playmate, notwithstanding that share in the higher education of
the country which had exalted his views of rank and income.

"When a man is not loved, it is no use for him to say that he could be
a better fellow--could do anything--I mean, if he were sure of being
loved in return."

"Not of the least use in the world for him to say he _could_ be better.
Might, could, would--they are contemptible auxiliaries."

"I don't see how a man is to be good for much unless he has some one
woman to love him dearly."

"I think the goodness should come before he expects that."

"You know better, Mary.  Women don't love men for their goodness."

"Perhaps not.  But if they love them, they never think them bad."

"It is hardly fair to say I am bad."

"I said nothing at all about you."

"I never shall be good for anything, Mary, if you will not say that you
love me--if you will not promise to marry me--I mean, when I am able to
marry."

"If I did love you, I would not marry you: I would certainly not
promise ever to marry you."

"I think that is quite wicked, Mary.  If you love me, you ought to
promise to marry me."

"On the contrary, I think it would be wicked in me to marry you even if
I did love you."

"You mean, just as I am, without any means of maintaining a wife.  Of
course: I am but three-and-twenty."

"In that last point you will alter.  But I am not so sure of any other
alteration.  My father says an idle man ought not to exist, much less,
be married."

"Then I am to blow my brains out?"

"No; on the whole I should think you would do better to pass your
examination.  I have heard Mr. Farebrother say it is disgracefully
easy."

"That is all very fine.  Anything is easy to him.  Not that cleverness
has anything to do with it.  I am ten times cleverer than many men who
pass."

"Dear me!" said Mary, unable to repress her sarcasm; "that accounts for
the curates like Mr. Crowse.  Divide your cleverness by ten, and the
quotient--dear me!--is able to take a degree.  But that only shows you
are ten times more idle than the others."

"Well, if I did pass, you would not want me to go into the Church?"

"That is not the question--what I want you to do.  You have a
conscience of your own, I suppose.  There! there is Mr. Lydgate.  I
must go and tell my uncle."

"Mary," said Fred, seizing her hand as she rose; "if you will not give
me some encouragement, I shall get worse instead of better."

"I will not give you any encouragement," said Mary, reddening.  "Your
friends would dislike it, and so would mine.  My father would think it
a disgrace to me if I accepted a man who got into debt, and would not
work!"

Fred was stung, and released her hand.  She walked to the door, but
there she turned and said: "Fred, you have always been so good, so
generous to me.  I am not ungrateful.  But never speak to me in that
way again."

"Very well," said Fred, sulkily, taking up his hat and whip.  His
complexion showed patches of pale pink and dead white.  Like many a
plucked idle young gentleman, he was thoroughly in love, and with a
plain girl, who had no money!  But having Mr. Featherstone's land in
the background, and a persuasion that, let Mary say what she would, she
really did care for him, Fred was not utterly in despair.

When he got home, he gave four of the twenties to his mother, asking
her to keep them for him.  "I don't want to spend that money, mother.
I want it to pay a debt with.  So keep it safe away from my fingers."

"Bless you, my dear," said Mrs. Vincy.  She doted on her eldest son and
her youngest girl (a child of six), whom others thought her two
naughtiest children.  The mother's eyes are not always deceived in
their partiality: she at least can best judge who is the tender,
filial-hearted child.  And Fred was certainly very fond of his mother.
Perhaps it was his fondness for another person also that made him
particularly anxious to take some security against his own liability to
spend the hundred pounds.  For the creditor to whom he owed a hundred
and sixty held a firmer security in the shape of a bill signed by
Mary's father.



    "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.



    "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.

 Bulstrode plans to name Lydgate as superintendent of the new Fever Hospital. Farebrother warns Lydgate that he will incur professional jealousy among other Middlemarch medical men because he wants to reform their outdated treatments. The hospital lies within Mr. Farebrother's parish, but Bulstrode wishes to elect another clergyman because he doesn't like Farebrother's doctrine. He wishes to elect Mr. Tyke as chaplain for the hospital. Lydgate replies that he doesn't want to become involved in clerical disputes. Lydgate is the orphan son of a military man, and he settled on the medical profession at a young age. His guardians paid for his education, but he is forced to earn his own living, and he doesn't plan to marry soon. He once fell in love with an actress who killed her husband on stage. She reported that it was an accident, and Lydgate helped clear her of charges. She later confessed that she meant to do it, and he resolved to avoid romantic entanglements for a long while. He wants to discover the tissue that is the most basic building block of life. Bulstrode arrived in Middlemarch some twenty years ago, and no one knows his origins. He managed to marry Mr. Vincy's sister and ally himself with an important, respectable family. He has an intimate view into the private lives of Middlemarch citizens through their finances. He uses his money as a lever to spread his strict Protestant ethic and to scrutinize its effect on his fellow citizens. Power is his favorite game. Mr. Vincy arrives, and Lydgate is rescued from the sticky situation. Fred has told his father about Featherstone's request. Bulstrode is reluctant to write the letter because he disapproves of Fred's extravagant habits. He believes that Vincy made a mistake in paying for Fred's expensive college education. Vincy criticizes Bulstrode for moralizing and hints that his sister, Mrs. Bulstrode, will disapprove of Bulstrode's refusal to help her brother's family. Bulstrode agrees to write the letter after a short consultation with his wife. Fred delivers the letter, and Featherstone gives him one hundred pounds as a gift. Fred retreats to speak with Mary. He doesn't want to be a clergyman, and he has failed his examination at college. Fred demands that she promise to marry him, but she refuses. She suggests that he pass his exam as proof that he is not an idler, even though she thinks he would be an unfit clergyman. She refuses to encourage his marriage prospects. Fred returns home in low spirits and asks his mother to hold eighty pounds. He owes one hundred and sixty pounds for a gambling debt. His creditor holds a bill signed by Mary's father as security against the debt. Lydgate attends dinner at the Vincy household, where the debate over Tyke rages on. Vincy states his preference for Farebrother on matters of doctrine. Lydgate states that he only wants to choose the best man for the job, rather than the person he likes most. The debate turns to reforms of the medical profession, and Lydgate finds himself in the minority when he supports them. He inadvertently insults the Middlemarch coroner. He converses with Rosamond and finds her very much to his liking. Farebrother arrives and invites Lydgate to visit him. Lydgate observes Farebrother's skill at card games. Later, he wonders whether Farebrother cares for the money he wins at cards. His thoughts turn to Rosamond. He admires her, but he doesn't plan to marry for some years. He doesn't know that Rosamond has other ideas. She thinks he has important, aristocratic relations. She believes she will live in aristocratic style as his wife.

