if he had
been a Lord Chancellor; indeed it is probable that his professional weight was
the more believed in, the world-old association of cleverness with the evil
principle being still potent in the minds even of lady-patients who had the
strictest ideas of frilling and sentiment. It was perhaps this negation in the
Doctor which made his neighbours call him hard-headed and dry-witted; conditions
of texture which were also held favourable to the storing of judgments connected
with drugs. At all events, it is certain that if any medical man had come to
Middlemarch with the reputation of having very definite religious views, of
being given to prayer, and of otherwise showing an active piety, there would
have been a general presumption against his medical skill.
    On this ground it was (professionally speaking) fortunate for Dr. Minchin
that his religious sympathies were of a general kind, and such as gave a distant
medical sanction to all serious sentiment, whether of Church or Dissent, rather
than any adhesion to particular tenets. If Mr. Bulstrode insisted, as he was apt
to do, on the Lutheran doctrine of justification, as that by which a Church must
stand or fall, Dr. Minchin in return was quite sure that man was not a mere
machine or a fortuitous conjunction of atoms; if Mrs. Wimple insisted on a
particular providence in relation to her stomach complaint, Dr. Minchin for his
part liked to keep the mental windows open and objected to fixed limits; if the
Unitarian brewer jested about the Athanasian Creed, Dr. Minchin quoted Pope's
Essay on Man. He objected to the rather free style of anecdote in which Dr.
Sprague indulged, preferring well-sanctioned quotations, and liking refinement
of all kinds: it was generally known that he had some kinship to a bishop, and
sometimes spent his holidays at »the palace.«
    Dr. Minchin was soft-handed, pale-complexioned, and of rounded outline, not
to be distinguished from a mild clergyman in appearance: whereas Dr. Sprague was
superfluously tall; his trousers got creased at the knees, and showed an excess
of boot at a time when straps seemed necessary to any dignity of bearing; you
heard him go in and out, and up and down, as if he had come to see after the
roofing. In short, he had weight, and might be expected to grapple with a
disease and throw it; while Dr. Minchin might be better able to detect it
lurking and to circumvent it. They enjoyed about equally the mysterious
privilege of medical reputation, and concealed with much etiquette their
contempt