
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 ardour in generous unpaid toil cooled as imperceptibly as the
ardour 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,
