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.




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