plans for several dramas, trying prose and finding it too jejune, trying verse
and finding it too artificial, beginning to copy »bits« from old pictures,
leaving off because they were »no good,« and observing that, after all,
self-culture was the principal point; while in politics he would have been
sympathising warmly with liberty and progress in general. Our sense of duty must
often wait for some work which shall take the place of dilettanteism and make us
feel that the quality of our action is not a matter of indifference.
    Ladislaw had now accepted his bit of work, though it was not that
indeterminate loftiest thing which he had once dreamed of as alone worthy of
continuous effort. His nature warmed easily in the presence of subjects which
were visibly mixed with life and action, and the easily-stirred rebellion in him
helped the glow of public spirit. In spite of Mr. Casaubon and the banishment
from Lowick, he was rather happy; getting a great deal of fresh knowledge in a
vivid way and for practical purposes, and making the Pioneer celebrated as far
as Brassing (never mind the smallness of the area; the writing was not worse
than much that reaches the four corners of the earth).
    Mr. Brooke was occasionally irritating; but Will's impatience was relieved
by the division of his time between visits to the Grange and retreats to his
Middlemarch lodgings, which gave variety to his life.
    »Shift the pegs a little,« he said to himself, »and Mr. Brooke might be in
the Cabinet, while I was Under-Secretary. That is the common order of things:
the little waves make the large ones and are of the same pattern. I am better
here than in the sort of life Mr. Casaubon would have trained me for, where the
doing would be all laid down by a precedent too rigid for me to react upon. I
don't care for prestige or high pay.«
    As Lydgate had said of him, he was a sort of gypsy, rather enjoying the
sense of belonging to no class; he had a feeling of romance in his position, and
a pleasant consciousness of creating a little surprise wherever he went. That
sort of enjoyment had been disturbed when he had felt some new distance between
himself and Dorothea in their accidental meeting at Lydgate's, and his
irritation had gone out towards Mr. Casaubon, who had declared beforehand that
Will would lose caste. »I never had any caste,« he would have said, if that
prophecy had been uttered to him, and the quick blood