you will offend Bulstrode.«
    »What is there against Bulstrode?« said Lydgate, emphatically.
    »I did not say there was anything against him except that. If you vote
against him you will make him your enemy.«
    »I don't know that I need mind about that,« said Lydgate, rather proudly;
»but he seems to have good ideas about hospitals, and he spends large sums on
useful public objects. He might help me a good deal in carrying out my ideas. As
to his religious notions - why, as Voltaire said, incantations will destroy a
flock of sheep if administered with a certain quantity of arsenic. I look for
the man who will bring the arsenic, and don't mind about his incantations.«
    »Very good. But then you must not offend your arsenic-man. You will not
offend me, you know,« said Mr. Farebrother, quite unaffectedly. »I don't
translate my own convenience into other people's duties. I am opposed to
Bulstrode in many ways. I don't like the set he belongs to: they are a narrow
ignorant set, and do more to make their neighbours uncomfortable than to make
them better. Their system is a sort of worldly-spiritual cliqueism: they really
look on the rest of mankind as a doomed carcass which is to nourish them for
heaven. But,« he added, smilingly, »I don't say that Bulstrode's new hospital is
a bad thing; and as to his wanting to oust me from the old one - why, if he
thinks me a mischievous fellow, he is only returning a compliment. And I am not
a model clergyman - only a decent makeshift.«
    Lydgate was not at all sure that the Vicar maligned himself. A model
clergyman, like a model doctor, ought to think his own profession the finest in
the world, and take all knowledge as mere nourishment to his moral pathology and
therapeutics. He only said, »What reason does Bulstrode give for superseding
you?«
    »That I don't teach his opinions - which he calls spiritual religion; and
that I have no time to spare. Both statements are true. But then I could make
time, and I should be glad of the forty pounds. That is the plain fact of the
case. But let us dismiss it. I only wanted to tell you that if you vote for your
arsenic-man, you are not to cut me in consequence. I can't spare you. You are a
sort of circumnavigator