come to settle among us, and will keep up my belief in
the antipodes. Now tell me all about them in Paris.«
 

                                 Chapter XVIII

 »Oh, sir, the loftiest hopes on earth
 Draw lots with meaner hopes: heroic breasts,
 Breathing bad air, run risk of pestilence;
 Or, lacking lime-juice when they cross the Line,
 May languish with the scurvy.«
 
Some weeks passed after this conversation before the question of the chaplaincy
gathered any practical import for Lydgate, and without telling himself the
reason, he deferred the predetermination on which side he should give his vote.
It would really have been a matter of total indifference to him - that is to
say, he would have taken the more convenient side, and given his vote for the
appointment of Tyke without any hesitation - if he had not cared personally for
Mr. Farebrother.
    But his liking for the Vicar of St Botolph's grew with growing
acquaintanceship. That, entering into Lydgate's position as a new-comer who had
his own professional objects to secure, Mr. Farebrother should have taken pains
rather to warn off than to obtain his interest, showed an unusual delicacy and
generosity, which Lydgate's nature was keenly alive to. It went along with other
points of conduct in Mr. Farebrother which were exceptionally fine, and made his
character resemble those southern landscapes which seem divided between natural
grandeur and social slovenliness. Very few men could have been as filial and
chivalrous as he was to the mother, aunt, and sister, whose dependence on him
had in many ways shaped his life rather uneasily for himself; few men who feel
the pressure of small needs are so nobly resolute not to dress up their
inevitably self-interested desires in a pretext of better motives. In these
matters he was conscious that his life would bear the closest scrutiny; and
perhaps the consciousness encouraged a little defiance towards the critical
strictness of persons whose celestial intimacies seemed not to improve their
domestic manners, and whose lofty aims were not needed to account for their
actions. Then, his preaching was ingenious and pithy, like the preaching of the
English Church in its robust age, and his sermons were delivered without book.
People outside his parish went to hear him; and, since to fill the church was
always the most difficult part of a clergyman's function, here was another
ground for a careless sense of superiority. Besides, he was a likeable man:
sweet-tempered, ready-witted, frank, without grins of suppressed bitterness or
other conversational flavours which make half of us an affliction to our
friends.