could a
man be satisfied with a decision between such alternatives and under such
circumstances? No more than he can be satisfied with his hat, which he has
chosen from among such shapes as the resources of the age offer him, wearing it
at best with a resignation which is chiefly supported by comparison.
    But Mr. Farebrother met him with the same friendliness as before. The
character of the publican and sinner is not always practically incompatible with
that of the modern Pharisee, for the majority of us scarcely see more distinctly
the faultiness of our own conduct than the faultiness of our own arguments, or
the dulness of our own jokes. But the Vicar of St Botolph's had certainly
escaped the slightest tincture of the Pharisee, and by dint of admitting to
himself that he was too much as other men were, he had become remarkably unlike
them in this - that he could excuse others for thinking slightly of him, and
could judge impartially of their conduct even when it told against him.
    »The world has been too strong for me, I know,« he said one day to Lydgate.
»But then I am not a mighty man - I shall never be a man of renown. The choice
of Hercules is a pretty fable; but Prodicus makes it easy work for the hero, as
if the first resolves were enough. Another story says that he came to hold the
distaff, and at last wore the Nessus shirt. I suppose one good resolve might
keep a man right if everybody else's resolve helped him.«
    The Vicar's talk was not always inspiriting: he had escaped being a
Pharisee, but he had not escaped that low estimate of possibilities which we
rather hastily arrive at as an inference from our own failure. Lydgate thought
that there was a pitiable infirmity of will in Mr. Farebrother.
 

                                  Chapter XIX

 »L'altra vedete ch'ha fatto alla guancia
 Della sua palma, sospirando, letto.«
                                                                Purgatorio, vii.
 
When George the Fourth was still reigning over the privacies of Windsor, when
the Duke of Wellington was Prime Minister, and Mr. Vincy was mayor of the old
corporation in Middlemarch, Mrs. Casaubon, born Dorothea Brooke, had taken her
wedding journey to Rome. In those days the world in general was more ignorant of
good and evil by forty years than it is at present. Travellers did not often
carry full information on Christian art either in their heads or their pockets;
and even the most brilliant English critic of the day mistook the flower-flushed
tomb of the ascended Virgin for an ornamental vase due to the painter's