 less dubiously mixed.
    Mr. Brooke lived to a good old age, and his estate was inherited by
Dorothea's son, who might have represented Middlemarch, but declined, thinking
that his opinions had less chance of being stifled if he remained oat of doors.
    Sir James never ceased to regard Dorothea's second marriage as a mistake;
and indeed this remained the tradition concerning it in Middlemarch, where she
was spoken of to a younger generation as a fine girl who married a sickly
clergyman, old enough to be her father, and in little more than a year after his
death gave up her estate to marry his cousin - young enough to have been his
son, with no property, and not well-born. Those who had not seen anything of
Dorothea usually observed that she could not have been »a nice woman,« else she
would not have married either the one or the other.
    Certainly those determining acts of her life were not ideally beautiful.
They were the mixed result of young and noble impulse struggling amidst the
conditions of an imperfect social state, in which great feelings will often take
the aspect of error, and great faith the aspect of illusion. For there is no
creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by
what lies outside it. A new Theresa will hardly have the opportunity of
reforming a conventual life, any more than a new Antigone will spend her heroic
piety in daring all for the sake of a brother's burial: the medium in which
their ardent deeds took shape is for ever gone. But we insignificant people with
our daily words and acts are preparing the lives of many Dorotheas, some of
which may present a far sadder sacrifice than that of the Dorothea whose story
we know.
    Her finely-touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not
widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the
strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the
effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the
growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that
things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to
the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

