 by the independent value of his work. For it must be remembered that
this was a dark period; and in spite of venerable colleges which used great
efforts to secure purity of knowledge by making it scarce, and to exclude error
by a rigid exclusiveness in relation to fees and appointments, it happened that
very ignorant young gentlemen were promoted in town, and many more got a legal
right to practise over large areas in the country. Also, the high standard held
up to the public mind by the College of Physicians, which gave its peculiar
sanction to the expensive and highly-rarified medical instruction obtained by
graduates of Oxford and Cambridge, did not hinder quackery from having an
excellent time of it; for since professional practice chiefly consisted in
giving a great many drugs, the public inferred that it might be better off with
more drugs still, if they could only be got cheaply, and hence swallowed large
cubic measures of physic prescribed by unscrupulous ignorance which had taken no
degrees. Considering that statistics had not yet embraced a calculation as to
the number of ignorant or canting doctors which absolutely must exist in the
teeth of all changes, it seemed to Lydgate that a change in the units was the
most direct mode of changing the numbers. He meant to be a unit who would make a
certain amount of difference towards that spreading change which would one day
tell appreciably upon the averages, and in the mean time have the pleasure of
making an advantageous difference to the viscera of his own patients. But he did
not simply aim at a more genuine kind of practice than was common. He was
ambitious of a wider effect: he was fired with the possibility that he might
work out the proof of an anatomical conception and make a link in the chain of
discovery.
    Does it seem incongruous to you that a Middlemarch surgeon should dream of
himself as a discoverer? Most of us, indeed, know little of the great
originators until they have been lifted up among the constellations and already
rule our fates. But that Herschel, for example, who »broke the barriers of the
heavens« - did he not once play a provincial church-organ, and give
music-lessons to stumbling pianists? Each of those Shining Ones had to walk on
the earth among neighbours who perhaps thought much more of his gait and his
garments than of anything which was to give him a title to everlasting fame:
each of them had his little local personal history sprinkled with small
temptations and sordid cares, which made the retarding friction of his course
towards final companionship with the immortals. Lydgate was not blind to the
dangers of such friction,
