he counted on quiet
intervals to be watchfully seized, for taking up the threads of investigation -
on many hints to be won from diligent application, not only of the scalpel, but
of the microscope, which research had begun to use again with new enthusiasm of
reliance. Such was Lydgate's plan of his future: to do good small work for
Middlemarch, and great work for the world.
    He was certainly a happy fellow at this time: to be seven-and-twenty,
without any fixed vices, with a generous resolution that his action should be
beneficent, and with ideas in his brain that made life interesting quite apart
from the cultus of horse-flesh and other mystic rites of costly observance,
which the eight hundred pounds left him after buying his practice would
certainly not have gone far in paying for. He was at a starting-point which
makes many a man's career a fine subject for betting, if there were any
gentlemen given to that amusement who could appreciate the complicated
probabilites of an arduous purpose, with all the possible thwartings and
furtherings of circumstance, all the niceties of inward balance, by which a man
swims and makes his point or else is carried headlong. The risk would remain,
even with close knowledge of Lydgate's character; for character too is a process
and an unfolding. The man was still in the making, as much as the Middlemarch
doctor and immortal discoverer, and there were both virtues and faults capable
of shrinking or expanding. The faults will not, I hope, be a reason for the
withdrawal of your interest in him. Among our valued friends is there not some
one or other who is a little too self-confident and disdainful; whose
distinguished mind is a little spotted with commonness; who is a little pinched
here and protuberant there with native prejudices; or whose better energies are
liable to lapse down the wrong channel under the influence of transient
solicitations? All these things might be alleged against Lydgate, but then, they
are the periphrases of a polite preacher, who talks of Adam, and would not like
to mention anything painful to the pew-renters. The particular faults from which
these delicate generalities are distilled have distinguishable physiognomies,
diction, accent, and grimaces; filling up parts in very various dramas. Our
vanities differ as our noses do: all conceit is not the same conceit, but varies
in correspondence with the minutiæ of mental make in which one of us differs
from another. Lydgate's conceit was of the arrogant sort, never simpering, never
impertinent, but massive in its claims and benevolently contemptuous