"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.




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