, as if delivered from a camp-stool in a
parrot-house. I at least have so much to do in unravelling certain human lots,
and seeing how they were woven and interwoven, that all the light I can command
must be concentrated on this particular web, and not dispersed over that
tempting range of relevancies called the universe.
    At present I have to make the new settler Lydgate better known to any one
interested in him than he could possibly be even to those who had seen the most
of him since his arrival in Middlemarch. For surely all must admit that a man
may be puffed and belauded, envied, ridiculed, counted upon as a tool and fallen
in love with, or at least selected as a future husband, and yet remain virtually
unknown - known merely as a cluster of signs for his neighbours' false
suppositions. There was a general impression, however, that Lydgate was not
altogether a common country doctor, and in Middlemarch at that time such an
impression was significant of great things being expected from him. For
everybody's family doctor was remarkably clever, and was understood to have
immeasurable skill in the management and training of the most skittish or
vicious diseases. The evidence of his cleverness was of the higher intuitive
order, lying in his lady-patients' immovable conviction, and was unassailable by
any objection except that their intuitions were opposed by others equally
strong; each lady who saw medical truth in Wrench and »the strengthening
treatment« regarding Toller and »the lowering system« as medical perdition. For
the heroic times of copious bleeding and blistering had not yet departed, still
less the times of thoroughgoing theory, when disease in general was called by
some bad name, and treated accordingly without shilly-shally - as if, for
example, it were to be called insurrection, which must not be fired on with
blank-cartridge, but have its blood drawn at once. The strengtheners and the
lowerers were all »clever« men in somebody's opinion, which is really as much as
can be said for any living talents. Nobody's imagination had gone so far as to
conjecture that Mr. Lydgate could know as much as Dr. Sprague and Dr. Minchin,
the two physicians, who alone could offer any hope when danger was extreme, and
when the smallest hope was worth a guinea. Still, I repeat, there was a general
impression that Lydgate was something rather more uncommon than any general
practitioner in Middlemarch. And this was true. He was but seven-and- an age at
which many men are not quite common - at