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.




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