第 四十五 章 · Chapter XLV

It is the humor of many heads to extol the days of their forefathers,

and declaim against the wickedness of times present. Which

notwithstanding they cannot handsomely do, without the borrowed help

and satire of times past; condemning the vices of their own times, by

the expressions of vices in times which they commend, which cannot but

argue the community of vice in both. Horace, therefore, Juvenal, and

Persius, were no prophets, although their lines did seem to indigitate

and point at our times.—SIR THOMAS BROWNE: _Pseudodoxia Epidemica_.

That opposition to the New Fever Hospital which Lydgate had sketched to

Dorothea was, like other oppositions, to be viewed in many different

lights. He regarded it as a mixture of jealousy and dunderheaded

prejudice. Mr. Bulstrode saw in it not only medical jealousy but a

determination to thwart himself, prompted mainly by a hatred of that

vital religion of which he had striven to be an effectual lay

representative—a hatred which certainly found pretexts apart from

religion such as were only too easy to find in the entanglements of

human action. These might be called the ministerial views. But

oppositions have the illimitable range of objections at command, which

need never stop short at the boundary of knowledge, but can draw

forever on the vasts of ignorance. What the opposition in Middlemarch

said about the New Hospital and its administration had certainly a

great deal of echo in it, for heaven has taken care that everybody

shall not be an originator; but there were differences which

represented every social shade between the polished moderation of Dr.

Minchin and the trenchant assertion of Mrs. Dollop, the landlady of the

Tankard in Slaughter Lane.

Mrs. Dollop became more and more convinced by her own asseveration,

that Dr. Lydgate meant to let the people die in the Hospital, if not to

poison them, for the sake of cutting them up without saying by your

leave or with your leave; for it was a known “fac” that he had wanted

to cut up Mrs. Goby, as respectable a woman as any in Parley Street,

who had money in trust before her marriage—a poor tale for a doctor,

who if he was good for anything should know what was the matter with

you before you died, and not want to pry into your inside after you

were gone. If that was not reason, Mrs. Dollop wished to know what was;

but there was a prevalent feeling in her audience that her opinion was

a bulwark, and that if it were overthrown there would be no limits to

the cutting-up of bodies, as had been well seen in Burke and Hare with

their pitch-plaisters—such a hanging business as that was not wanted in

Middlemarch!

And let it not be supposed that opinion at the Tankard in Slaughter

Lane was unimportant to the medical profession: that old authentic

public-house—the original Tankard, known by the name of Dollop’s—was

the resort of a great Benefit Club, which had some months before put to

the vote whether its long-standing medical man, “Doctor Gambit,” should

not be cashiered in favor of “this Doctor Lydgate,” who was capable of

performing the most astonishing cures, and rescuing people altogether

given up by other practitioners. But the balance had been turned

against Lydgate by two members, who for some private reasons held that

this power of resuscitating persons as good as dead was an equivocal

recommendation, and might interfere with providential favors. In the

course of the year, however, there had been a change in the public

sentiment, of which the unanimity at Dollop’s was an index.

A good deal more than a year ago, before anything was known of

Lydgate’s skill, the judgments on it had naturally been divided,

depending on a sense of likelihood, situated perhaps in the pit of the

stomach or in the pineal gland, and differing in its verdicts, but not

the less valuable as a guide in the total deficit of evidence. Patients

who had chronic diseases or whose lives had long been worn threadbare,

like old Featherstone’s, had been at once inclined to try him; also,

many who did not like paying their doctor’s bills, thought agreeably of

opening an account with a new doctor and sending for him without stint

if the children’s temper wanted a dose, occasions when the old

practitioners were often crusty; and all persons thus inclined to

employ Lydgate held it likely that he was clever. Some considered that

he might do more than others “where there was liver;”—at least there

would be no harm in getting a few bottles of “stuff” from him, since if

these proved useless it would still be possible to return to the

Purifying Pills, which kept you alive if they did not remove the

yellowness. But these were people of minor importance. Good Middlemarch

families were of course not going to change their doctor without reason

shown; and everybody who had employed Mr. Peacock did not feel obliged

to accept a new man merely in the character of his successor, objecting

that he was “not likely to be equal to Peacock.”

But Lydgate had not been long in the town before there were particulars

enough reported of him to breed much more specific expectations and to

intensify differences into partisanship; some of the particulars being

of that impressive order of which the significance is entirely hidden,

like a statistical amount without a standard of comparison, but with a

note of exclamation at the end. The cubic feet of oxygen yearly

swallowed by a full-grown man—what a shudder they might have created in

some Middlemarch circles! “Oxygen! nobody knows what that may be—is it

any wonder the cholera has got to Dantzic? And yet there are people who

say quarantine is no good!”

One of the facts quickly rumored was that Lydgate did not dispense

drugs. This was offensive both to the physicians whose exclusive

distinction seemed infringed on, and to the surgeon-apothecaries with

whom he ranged himself; and only a little while before, they might have

counted on having the law on their side against a man who without

calling himself a London-made M.D. dared to ask for pay except as a

charge on drugs. But Lydgate had not been experienced enough to foresee

that his new course would be even more offensive to the laity; and to

Mr. Mawmsey, an important grocer in the Top Market, who, though not one

of his patients, questioned him in an affable manner on the subject, he

was injudicious enough to give a hasty popular explanation of his

reasons, pointing out to Mr. Mawmsey that it must lower the character

of practitioners, and be a constant injury to the public, if their only

mode of getting paid for their work was by their making out long bills

for draughts, boluses, and mixtures.

“It is in that way that hard-working medical men may come to be almost

as mischievous as quacks,” said Lydgate, rather thoughtlessly. “To get

their own bread they must overdose the king’s lieges; and that’s a bad

sort of treason, Mr. Mawmsey—undermines the constitution in a fatal

way.”

Mr. Mawmsey was not only an overseer (it was about a question of

outdoor pay that he was having an interview with Lydgate), he was also

asthmatic and had an increasing family: thus, from a medical point of

view, as well as from his own, he was an important man; indeed, an

exceptional grocer, whose hair was arranged in a flame-like pyramid,

and whose retail deference was of the cordial, encouraging

kind—jocosely complimentary, and with a certain considerate abstinence

from letting out the full force of his mind. It was Mr. Mawmsey’s

friendly jocoseness in questioning him which had set the tone of

Lydgate’s reply. But let the wise be warned against too great readiness

at explanation: it multiplies the sources of mistake, lengthening the

sum for reckoners sure to go wrong.

Lydgate smiled as he ended his speech, putting his foot into the

stirrup, and Mr. Mawmsey laughed more than he would have done if he had

known who the king’s lieges were, giving his “Good morning, sir,

good-morning, sir,” with the air of one who saw everything clearly

enough. But in truth his views were perturbed. For years he had been

paying bills with strictly made items, so that for every half-crown and

eighteen-pence he was certain something measurable had been delivered.

He had done this with satisfaction, including it among his

responsibilities as a husband and father, and regarding a longer bill

than usual as a dignity worth mentioning. Moreover, in addition to the

massive benefit of the drugs to “self and family,” he had enjoyed the

pleasure of forming an acute judgment as to their immediate effects, so

as to give an intelligent statement for the guidance of Mr. Gambit—a

practitioner just a little lower in status than Wrench or Toller, and

especially esteemed as an accoucheur, of whose ability Mr. Mawmsey had

the poorest opinion on all other points, but in doctoring, he was wont

to say in an undertone, he placed Gambit above any of them.

Here were deeper reasons than the superficial talk of a new man, which

appeared still flimsier in the drawing-room over the shop, when they

were recited to Mrs. Mawmsey, a woman accustomed to be made much of as

a fertile mother,—generally under attendance more or less frequent from

Mr. Gambit, and occasionally having attacks which required Dr. Minchin.

“Does this Mr. Lydgate mean to say there is no use in taking medicine?”

said Mrs. Mawmsey, who was slightly given to drawling. “I should like

him to tell me how I could bear up at Fair time, if I didn’t take

strengthening medicine for a month beforehand. Think of what I have to

provide for calling customers, my dear!”—here Mrs. Mawmsey turned to an

intimate female friend who sat by—“a large veal pie—a stuffed fillet—a

round of beef—ham, tongue, et cetera, et cetera! But what keeps me up

best is the pink mixture, not the brown. I wonder, Mr. Mawmsey, with

_your_ experience, you could have patience to listen. I should have

told him at once that I knew a little better than that.”

“No, no, no,” said Mr. Mawmsey; “I was not going to tell him my

opinion. Hear everything and judge for yourself is my motto. But he

didn’t know who he was talking to. I was not to be turned on _his_

finger. People often pretend to tell me things, when they might as well

say, ‘Mawmsey, you’re a fool.’ But I smile at it: I humor everybody’s

weak place. If physic had done harm to self and family, I should have

found it out by this time.”

The next day Mr. Gambit was told that Lydgate went about saying physic

was of no use.

“Indeed!” said he, lifting his eyebrows with cautious surprise. (He was

a stout husky man with a large ring on his fourth finger.) “How will he

cure his patients, then?”

“That is what I say,” returned Mrs. Mawmsey, who habitually gave weight

to her speech by loading her pronouns. “Does _he_ suppose that people

will pay him only to come and sit with them and go away again?”

Mrs. Mawmsey had had a great deal of sitting from Mr. Gambit, including

very full accounts of his own habits of body and other affairs; but of

course he knew there was no innuendo in her remark, since his spare

time and personal narrative had never been charged for. So he replied,

humorously—

“Well, Lydgate is a good-looking young fellow, you know.”

“Not one that _I_ would employ,” said Mrs. Mawmsey. “_Others_ may do as

they please.”

Hence Mr. Gambit could go away from the chief grocer’s without fear of

rivalry, but not without a sense that Lydgate was one of those

hypocrites who try to discredit others by advertising their own

honesty, and that it might be worth some people’s while to show him up.

Mr. Gambit, however, had a satisfactory practice, much pervaded by the

smells of retail trading which suggested the reduction of cash payments

to a balance. And he did not think it worth his while to show Lydgate

up until he knew how. He had not indeed great resources of education,

and had had to work his own way against a good deal of professional

contempt; but he made none the worse accoucheur for calling the

breathing apparatus “longs.”

Other medical men felt themselves more capable. Mr. Toller shared the

highest practice in the town and belonged to an old Middlemarch family:

there were Tollers in the law and everything else above the line of

retail trade. Unlike our irascible friend Wrench, he had the easiest

way in the world of taking things which might be supposed to annoy him,

being a well-bred, quietly facetious man, who kept a good house, was

very fond of a little sporting when he could get it, very friendly with

Mr. Hawley, and hostile to Mr. Bulstrode. It may seem odd that with

such pleasant habits he should have been given to the heroic treatment,

bleeding and blistering and starving his patients, with a dispassionate

disregard to his personal example; but the incongruity favored the

opinion of his ability among his patients, who commonly observed that

Mr. Toller had lazy manners, but his treatment was as active as you

could desire: no man, said they, carried more seriousness into his

profession: he was a little slow in coming, but when he came, he _did_

something. He was a great favorite in his own circle, and whatever he

implied to any one’s disadvantage told doubly from his careless

ironical tone.

He naturally got tired of smiling and saying, “Ah!” when he was told

that Mr. Peacock’s successor did not mean to dispense medicines; and

Mr. Hackbutt one day mentioning it over the wine at a dinner-party, Mr.

Toller said, laughingly, “Dibbitts will get rid of his stale drugs,

then. I’m fond of little Dibbitts—I’m glad he’s in luck.”

“I see your meaning, Toller,” said Mr. Hackbutt, “and I am entirely of

your opinion. I shall take an opportunity of expressing myself to that

effect. A medical man should be responsible for the quality of the

drugs consumed by his patients. That is the rationale of the system of

charging which has hitherto obtained; and nothing is more offensive

than this ostentation of reform, where there is no real amelioration.”

“Ostentation, Hackbutt?” said Mr. Toller, ironically. “I don’t see

that. A man can’t very well be ostentatious of what nobody believes in.

There’s no reform in the matter: the question is, whether the profit on

the drugs is paid to the medical man by the druggist or by the patient,

and whether there shall be extra pay under the name of attendance.”

“Ah, to be sure; one of your damned new versions of old humbug,” said

Mr. Hawley, passing the decanter to Mr. Wrench.

Mr. Wrench, generally abstemious, often drank wine rather freely at a

party, getting the more irritable in consequence.

“As to humbug, Hawley,” he said, “that’s a word easy to fling about.

But what I contend against is the way medical men are fouling their own

nest, and setting up a cry about the country as if a general

practitioner who dispenses drugs couldn’t be a gentleman. I throw back

the imputation with scorn. I say, the most ungentlemanly trick a man

can be guilty of is to come among the members of his profession with

innovations which are a libel on their time-honored procedure. That is

my opinion, and I am ready to maintain it against any one who

contradicts me.” Mr. Wrench’s voice had become exceedingly sharp.

“I can’t oblige you there, Wrench,” said Mr. Hawley, thrusting his

hands into his trouser-pockets.

“My dear fellow,” said Mr. Toller, striking in pacifically, and looking

at Mr. Wrench, “the physicians have their toes trodden on more than we

have. If you come to dignity it is a question for Minchin and Sprague.”

“Does medical jurisprudence provide nothing against these

infringements?” said Mr. Hackbutt, with a disinterested desire to offer

his lights. “How does the law stand, eh, Hawley?”

“Nothing to be done there,” said Mr. Hawley. “I looked into it for

Sprague. You’d only break your nose against a damned judge’s decision.”

“Pooh! no need of law,” said Mr. Toller. “So far as practice is

concerned the attempt is an absurdity. No patient will like

it—certainly not Peacock’s, who have been used to depletion. Pass the

wine.”

Mr. Toller’s prediction was partly verified. If Mr. and Mrs. Mawmsey,

who had no idea of employing Lydgate, were made uneasy by his supposed

declaration against drugs, it was inevitable that those who called him

in should watch a little anxiously to see whether he did “use all the

means he might use” in the case. Even good Mr. Powderell, who in his

constant charity of interpretation was inclined to esteem Lydgate the

more for what seemed a conscientious pursuit of a better plan, had his

mind disturbed with doubts during his wife’s attack of erysipelas, and

could not abstain from mentioning to Lydgate that Mr. Peacock on a

similar occasion had administered a series of boluses which were not

otherwise definable than by their remarkable effect in bringing Mrs.

Powderell round before Michaelmas from an illness which had begun in a

remarkably hot August. At last, indeed, in the conflict between his

desire not to hurt Lydgate and his anxiety that no “means” should be

lacking, he induced his wife privately to take Widgeon’s Purifying

Pills, an esteemed Middlemarch medicine, which arrested every disease

at the fountain by setting to work at once upon the blood. This

co-operative measure was not to be mentioned to Lydgate, and Mr.

Powderell himself had no certain reliance on it, only hoping that it

might be attended with a blessing.

But in this doubtful stage of Lydgate’s introduction he was helped by

what we mortals rashly call good fortune. I suppose no doctor ever came

newly to a place without making cures that surprised somebody—cures

which may be called fortune’s testimonials, and deserve as much credit

as the written or printed kind. Various patients got well while Lydgate

was attending them, some even of dangerous illnesses; and it was

remarked that the new doctor with his new ways had at least the merit

of bringing people back from the brink of death. The trash talked on

such occasions was the more vexatious to Lydgate, because it gave

precisely the sort of prestige which an incompetent and unscrupulous

man would desire, and was sure to be imputed to him by the simmering

dislike of the other medical men as an encouragement on his own part of

ignorant puffing. But even his proud outspokenness was checked by the

discernment that it was as useless to fight against the interpretations

of ignorance as to whip the fog; and “good fortune” insisted on using

those interpretations.

Mrs. Larcher having just become charitably concerned about alarming

symptoms in her charwoman, when Dr. Minchin called, asked him to see

her then and there, and to give her a certificate for the Infirmary;

whereupon after examination he wrote a statement of the case as one of

tumor, and recommended the bearer Nancy Nash as an out-patient. Nancy,

calling at home on her way to the Infirmary, allowed the stay maker and

his wife, in whose attic she lodged, to read Dr. Minchin’s paper, and

by this means became a subject of compassionate conversation in the

neighboring shops of Churchyard Lane as being afflicted with a tumor at

first declared to be as large and hard as a duck’s egg, but later in

the day to be about the size of “your fist.” Most hearers agreed that

it would have to be cut out, but one had known of oil and another of

“squitchineal” as adequate to soften and reduce any lump in the body

when taken enough of into the inside—the oil by gradually “soopling,”

the squitchineal by eating away.

Meanwhile when Nancy presented herself at the Infirmary, it happened to

be one of Lydgate’s days there. After questioning and examining her,

Lydgate said to the house-surgeon in an undertone, “It’s not tumor:

it’s cramp.” He ordered her a blister and some steel mixture, and told

her to go home and rest, giving her at the same time a note to Mrs.

Larcher, who, she said, was her best employer, to testify that she was

in need of good food.

But by-and-by Nancy, in her attic, became portentously worse, the

supposed tumor having indeed given way to the blister, but only

wandered to another region with angrier pain. The staymaker’s wife went

to fetch Lydgate, and he continued for a fortnight to attend Nancy in

her own home, until under his treatment she got quite well and went to

work again. But the case continued to be described as one of tumor in

Churchyard Lane and other streets—nay, by Mrs. Larcher also; for when

Lydgate’s remarkable cure was mentioned to Dr. Minchin, he naturally

did not like to say, “The case was not one of tumor, and I was mistaken

in describing it as such,” but answered, “Indeed! ah! I saw it was a

surgical case, not of a fatal kind.” He had been inwardly annoyed,

however, when he had asked at the Infirmary about the woman he had

recommended two days before, to hear from the house-surgeon, a

youngster who was not sorry to vex Minchin with impunity, exactly what

had occurred: he privately pronounced that it was indecent in a general

practitioner to contradict a physician’s diagnosis in that open manner,

and afterwards agreed with Wrench that Lydgate was disagreeably

inattentive to etiquette. Lydgate did not make the affair a ground for

valuing himself or (very particularly) despising Minchin, such

rectification of misjudgments often happening among men of equal

qualifications. But report took up this amazing case of tumor, not

clearly distinguished from cancer, and considered the more awful for

being of the wandering sort; till much prejudice against Lydgate’s

method as to drugs was overcome by the proof of his marvellous skill in

the speedy restoration of Nancy Nash after she had been rolling and

rolling in agonies from the presence of a tumor both hard and

obstinate, but nevertheless compelled to yield.

How could Lydgate help himself? It is offensive to tell a lady when she

is expressing her amazement at your skill, that she is altogether

mistaken and rather foolish in her amazement. And to have entered into

the nature of diseases would only have added to his breaches of medical

propriety. Thus he had to wince under a promise of success given by

that ignorant praise which misses every valid quality.

In the case of a more conspicuous patient, Mr. Borthrop Trumbull,

Lydgate was conscious of having shown himself something better than an

every-day doctor, though here too it was an equivocal advantage that he

won. The eloquent auctioneer was seized with pneumonia, and having been

a patient of Mr. Peacock’s, sent for Lydgate, whom he had expressed his

intention to patronize. Mr Trumbull was a robust man, a good subject

for trying the expectant theory upon—watching the course of an

interesting disease when left as much as possible to itself, so that

the stages might be noted for future guidance; and from the air with

which he described his sensations Lydgate surmised that he would like

to be taken into his medical man’s confidence, and be represented as a

partner in his own cure. The auctioneer heard, without much surprise,

that his was a constitution which (always with due watching) might be

left to itself, so as to offer a beautiful example of a disease with

all its phases seen in clear delineation, and that he probably had the

rare strength of mind voluntarily to become the test of a rational

procedure, and thus make the disorder of his pulmonary functions a

general benefit to society.

Mr. Trumbull acquiesced at once, and entered strongly into the view

that an illness of his was no ordinary occasion for medical science.

“Never fear, sir; you are not speaking to one who is altogether

ignorant of the _vis medicatrix_,” said he, with his usual superiority

of expression, made rather pathetic by difficulty of breathing. And he

went without shrinking through his abstinence from drugs, much

sustained by application of the thermometer which implied the

importance of his temperature, by the sense that he furnished objects

for the microscope, and by learning many new words which seemed suited

to the dignity of his secretions. For Lydgate was acute enough to

indulge him with a little technical talk.

It may be imagined that Mr. Trumbull rose from his couch with a

disposition to speak of an illness in which he had manifested the

strength of his mind as well as constitution; and he was not backward

in awarding credit to the medical man who had discerned the quality of

patient he had to deal with. The auctioneer was not an ungenerous man,

and liked to give others their due, feeling that he could afford it. He

had caught the words “expectant method,” and rang chimes on this and

other learned phrases to accompany the assurance that Lydgate “knew a

thing or two more than the rest of the doctors—was far better versed in

the secrets of his profession than the majority of his compeers.”

This had happened before the affair of Fred Vincy’s illness had given

to Mr. Wrench’s enmity towards Lydgate more definite personal ground.

The new-comer already threatened to be a nuisance in the shape of

rivalry, and was certainly a nuisance in the shape of practical

criticism or reflections on his hard-driven elders, who had had

something else to do than to busy themselves with untried notions. His

practice had spread in one or two quarters, and from the first the

report of his high family had led to his being pretty generally

invited, so that the other medical men had to meet him at dinner in the

best houses; and having to meet a man whom you dislike is not observed

always to end in a mutual attachment. There was hardly ever so much

unanimity among them as in the opinion that Lydgate was an arrogant

young fellow, and yet ready for the sake of ultimately predominating to

show a crawling subservience to Bulstrode. That Mr. Farebrother, whose

name was a chief flag of the anti-Bulstrode party, always defended

Lydgate and made a friend of him, was referred to Farebrother’s

unaccountable way of fighting on both sides.

Here was plenty of preparation for the outburst of professional disgust

at the announcement of the laws Mr. Bulstrode was laying down for the

direction of the New Hospital, which were the more exasperating because

there was no present possibility of interfering with his will and

pleasure, everybody except Lord Medlicote having refused help towards

the building, on the ground that they preferred giving to the Old

Infirmary. Mr. Bulstrode met all the expenses, and had ceased to be

sorry that he was purchasing the right to carry out his notions of

improvement without hindrance from prejudiced coadjutors; but he had

had to spend large sums, and the building had lingered. Caleb Garth had

undertaken it, had failed during its progress, and before the interior

fittings were begun had retired from the management of the business;

and when referring to the Hospital he often said that however Bulstrode

might ring if you tried him, he liked good solid carpentry and masonry,

and had a notion both of drains and chimneys. In fact, the Hospital had

become an object of intense interest to Bulstrode, and he would

willingly have continued to spare a large yearly sum that he might rule

it dictatorially without any Board; but he had another favorite object

which also required money for its accomplishment: he wished to buy some

land in the neighborhood of Middlemarch, and therefore he wished to get

considerable contributions towards maintaining the Hospital. Meanwhile

he framed his plan of management. The Hospital was to be reserved for

fever in all its forms; Lydgate was to be chief medical superintendent,

that he might have free authority to pursue all comparative

investigations which his studies, particularly in Paris, had shown him

the importance of, the other medical visitors having a consultative

influence, but no power to contravene Lydgate’s ultimate decisions; and

the general management was to be lodged exclusively in the hands of

five directors associated with Mr. Bulstrode, who were to have votes in

the ratio of their contributions, the Board itself filling up any

vacancy in its numbers, and no mob of small contributors being admitted

to a share of government.

There was an immediate refusal on the part of every medical man in the

town to become a visitor at the Fever Hospital.

“Very well,” said Lydgate to Mr. Bulstrode, “we have a capital

house-surgeon and dispenser, a clear-headed, neat-handed fellow; we’ll

get Webbe from Crabsley, as good a country practitioner as any of them,

to come over twice a-week, and in case of any exceptional operation,

Protheroe will come from Brassing. I must work the harder, that’s all,

and I have given up my post at the Infirmary. The plan will flourish in

spite of them, and then they’ll be glad to come in. Things can’t last

as they are: there must be all sorts of reform soon, and then young

fellows may be glad to come and study here.” Lydgate was in high

spirits.

“I shall not flinch, you may depend upon it, Mr. Lydgate,” said Mr.

Bulstrode. “While I see you carrying out high intentions with vigor,

you shall have my unfailing support. And I have humble confidence that

the blessing which has hitherto attended my efforts against the spirit

of evil in this town will not be withdrawn. Suitable directors to

assist me I have no doubt of securing. Mr. Brooke of Tipton has already

given me his concurrence, and a pledge to contribute yearly: he has not

specified the sum—probably not a great one. But he will be a useful

member of the board.”

A useful member was perhaps to be defined as one who would originate

nothing, and always vote with Mr. Bulstrode.

The medical aversion to Lydgate was hardly disguised now. Neither Dr.

Sprague nor Dr. Minchin said that he disliked Lydgate’s knowledge, or

his disposition to improve treatment: what they disliked was his

arrogance, which nobody felt to be altogether deniable. They implied

that he was insolent, pretentious, and given to that reckless

innovation for the sake of noise and show which was the essence of the

charlatan.

The word charlatan once thrown on the air could not be let drop. In

those days the world was agitated about the wondrous doings of Mr. St.

John Long, “noblemen and gentlemen” attesting his extraction of a fluid

like mercury from the temples of a patient.

Mr. Toller remarked one day, smilingly, to Mrs. Taft, that “Bulstrode

had found a man to suit him in Lydgate; a charlatan in religion is sure

to like other sorts of charlatans.”

“Yes, indeed, I can imagine,” said Mrs. Taft, keeping the number of

thirty stitches carefully in her mind all the while; “there are so many

of that sort. I remember Mr. Cheshire, with his irons, trying to make

people straight when the Almighty had made them crooked.”

“No, no,” said Mr. Toller, “Cheshire was all right—all fair and above

board. But there’s St. John Long—that’s the kind of fellow we call a

charlatan, advertising cures in ways nobody knows anything about: a

fellow who wants to make a noise by pretending to go deeper than other

people. The other day he was pretending to tap a man’s brain and get

quicksilver out of it.”

“Good gracious! what dreadful trifling with people’s constitutions!”

said Mrs. Taft.

After this, it came to be held in various quarters that Lydgate played

even with respectable constitutions for his own purposes, and how much

more likely that in his flighty experimenting he should make sixes and

sevens of hospital patients. Especially it was to be expected, as the

landlady of the Tankard had said, that he would recklessly cut up their

dead bodies. For Lydgate having attended Mrs. Goby, who died apparently

of a heart-disease not very clearly expressed in the symptoms, too

daringly asked leave of her relatives to open the body, and thus gave

an offence quickly spreading beyond Parley Street, where that lady had

long resided on an income such as made this association of her body

with the victims of Burke and Hare a flagrant insult to her memory.

Affairs were in this stage when Lydgate opened the subject of the

Hospital to Dorothea. We see that he was bearing enmity and silly

misconception with much spirit, aware that they were partly created by

his good share of success.

“They will not drive me away,” he said, talking confidentially in Mr.

Farebrother’s study. “I have got a good opportunity here, for the ends

I care most about; and I am pretty sure to get income enough for our

wants. By-and-by I shall go on as quietly as possible: I have no

seductions now away from home and work. And I am more and more

convinced that it will be possible to demonstrate the homogeneous

origin of all the tissues. Raspail and others are on the same track,

and I have been losing time.”

“I have no power of prophecy there,” said Mr. Farebrother, who had been

puffing at his pipe thoughtfully while Lydgate talked; “but as to the

hostility in the town, you’ll weather it if you are prudent.”

“How am I to be prudent?” said Lydgate, “I just do what comes before me

to do. I can’t help people’s ignorance and spite, any more than

Vesalius could. It isn’t possible to square one’s conduct to silly

conclusions which nobody can foresee.”

“Quite true; I didn’t mean that. I meant only two things. One is, keep

yourself as separable from Bulstrode as you can: of course, you can go

on doing good work of your own by his help; but don’t get tied. Perhaps

it seems like personal feeling in me to say so—and there’s a good deal

of that, I own—but personal feeling is not always in the wrong if you

boil it down to the impressions which make it simply an opinion.”

“Bulstrode is nothing to me,” said Lydgate, carelessly, “except on

public grounds. As to getting very closely united to him, I am not fond

enough of him for that. But what was the other thing you meant?” said

Lydgate, who was nursing his leg as comfortably as possible, and

feeling in no great need of advice.

“Why, this. Take care—_experto crede_—take care not to get hampered

about money matters. I know, by a word you let fall one day, that you

don’t like my playing at cards so much for money. You are right enough

there. But try and keep clear of wanting small sums that you haven’t

got. I am perhaps talking rather superfluously; but a man likes to

assume superiority over himself, by holding up his bad example and

sermonizing on it.”

Lydgate took Mr. Farebrother’s hints very cordially, though he would

hardly have borne them from another man. He could not help remembering

that he had lately made some debts, but these had seemed inevitable,

and he had no intention now to do more than keep house in a simple way.

The furniture for which he owed would not want renewing; nor even the

stock of wine for a long while.

Many thoughts cheered him at that time—and justly. A man conscious of

enthusiasm for worthy aims is sustained under petty hostilities by the

memory of great workers who had to fight their way not without wounds,

and who hover in his mind as patron saints, invisibly helping. At home,

that same evening when he had been chatting with Mr. Farebrother, he

had his long legs stretched on the sofa, his head thrown back, and his

hands clasped behind it according to his favorite ruminating attitude,

while Rosamond sat at the piano, and played one tune after another, of

which her husband only knew (like the emotional elephant he was!) that

they fell in with his mood as if they had been melodious sea-breezes.

There was something very fine in Lydgate’s look just then, and any one

might have been encouraged to bet on his achievement. In his dark eyes

and on his mouth and brow there was that placidity which comes from the

fulness of contemplative thought—the mind not searching, but beholding,

and the glance seeming to be filled with what is behind it.

Presently Rosamond left the piano and seated herself on a chair close

to the sofa and opposite her husband’s face.

“Is that enough music for you, my lord?” she said, folding her hands

before her and putting on a little air of meekness.

“Yes, dear, if you are tired,” said Lydgate, gently, turning his eyes

and resting them on her, but not otherwise moving. Rosamond’s presence

at that moment was perhaps no more than a spoonful brought to the lake,

and her woman’s instinct in this matter was not dull.

“What is absorbing you?” she said, leaning forward and bringing her

face nearer to his.

He moved his hands and placed them gently behind her shoulders.

“I am thinking of a great fellow, who was about as old as I am three

hundred years ago, and had already begun a new era in anatomy.”

“I can’t guess,” said Rosamond, shaking her head. “We used to play at

guessing historical characters at Mrs. Lemon’s, but not anatomists.”

“I’ll tell you. His name was Vesalius. And the only way he could get to

know anatomy as he did, was by going to snatch bodies at night, from

graveyards and places of execution.”

“Oh!” said Rosamond, with a look of disgust on her pretty face, “I am

very glad you are not Vesalius. I should have thought he might find

some less horrible way than that.”

“No, he couldn’t,” said Lydgate, going on too earnestly to take much

notice of her answer. “He could only get a complete skeleton by

snatching the whitened bones of a criminal from the gallows, and

burying them, and fetching them away by bits secretly, in the dead of

night.”

“I hope he is not one of your great heroes,” said Rosamond, half

playfully, half anxiously, “else I shall have you getting up in the

night to go to St. Peter’s churchyard. You know how angry you told me

the people were about Mrs. Goby. You have enemies enough already.”

“So had Vesalius, Rosy. No wonder the medical fogies in Middlemarch are

jealous, when some of the greatest doctors living were fierce upon

Vesalius because they had believed in Galen, and he showed that Galen

was wrong. They called him a liar and a poisonous monster. But the

facts of the human frame were on his side; and so he got the better of

them.”

“And what happened to him afterwards?” said Rosamond, with some

interest.

“Oh, he had a good deal of fighting to the last. And they did

exasperate him enough at one time to make him burn a good deal of his

work. Then he got shipwrecked just as he was coming from Jerusalem to

take a great chair at Padua. He died rather miserably.”

There was a moment’s pause before Rosamond said, “Do you know, Tertius,

I often wish you had not been a medical man.”

“Nay, Rosy, don’t say that,” said Lydgate, drawing her closer to him.

“That is like saying you wish you had married another man.”

“Not at all; you are clever enough for anything: you might easily have

been something else. And your cousins at Quallingham all think that you

have sunk below them in your choice of a profession.”

“The cousins at Quallingham may go to the devil!” said Lydgate, with

scorn. “It was like their impudence if they said anything of the sort

to you.”

“Still,” said Rosamond, “I do _not_ think it is a nice profession,

dear.” We know that she had much quiet perseverance in her opinion.

“It is the grandest profession in the world, Rosamond,” said Lydgate,

gravely. “And to say that you love me without loving the medical man in

me, is the same sort of thing as to say that you like eating a peach

but don’t like its flavor. Don’t say that again, dear, it pains me.”

“Very well, Doctor Grave-face,” said Rosy, dimpling, “I will declare in

future that I dote on skeletons, and body-snatchers, and bits of things

in phials, and quarrels with everybody, that end in your dying

miserably.”

“No, no, not so bad as that,” said Lydgate, giving up remonstrance and

petting her resignedly.