 lie too.
 2d Gent.
 Nay, power is relative; you cannot fright
 The coming pest with border fortresses,
 Or catch your carp with subtle argument.
 All force is twain in one: cause is not cause
 Unless effect be there; and action's self
 Must needs contain a passive. So command
 Exists but with obedience.
 
Even if Lydgate had been inclined to be quite open about his affairs, he knew
that it would have hardly been in Mr. Farebrother's power to give him the help
he immediately wanted. With the year's bills coming in from his tradesmen, with
Dover's threatening hold on his furniture, and with nothing to depend on but
slow dribbling payments from patients who must not be offended - for the
handsome fees he had had from Freshitt Hall and Lowick Manor had been easily
absorbed - nothing less than a thousand pounds would have freed him from actual
embarrassment, and left a residue which, according to the favourite phrase of
hopefulness in such circumstances, would have given him »time to look about
him.«
    Naturally, the merry Christmas bringing the happy New Year, when
fellow-citizens expect to be paid for the trouble and goods they have smilingly
bestowed on their neighbours, had so tightened the pressure of sordid cares on
Lydgate's mind that it was hardly possible for him to think unbrokenly of any
other subject, even the most habitual and soliciting. He was not an ill-tempered
man; his intellectual activity, the ardent kindness of his heart, as well as his
strong frame, would always, under tolerably easy conditions, have kept him above
the petty uncontrolled susceptibilities which make bad temper. But he was now a
prey to that worst irritation which arises not simply from annoyances, but from
the second consciousness underlying those annoyances, of wasted energy and a
degrading preoccupation, which was the reverse of all his former purposes. »This
is what I am thinking of; and that is what I might have been thinking of,« was
the bitter incessant murmur within him, making every difficulty a double goad to
impatience.
    Some gentlemen have made an amazing figure in literature by general
discontent with the universe as a trap of dulness into which their great souls
have fallen by mistake; but the sense of a stupendous self and an insignificant
world may have its consolations. Lydgate's discontent was much harder to bear:
it was the sense that there was a grand existence in thought and effective
action lying around him, while his self was being narrowed into the miserable
isolation of egoistic fears, and vulgar anxieties for events that might allay
such fears.
