“Black eyes you have
left, you say,
Blue eyes fail to draw
you;
Yet you seem more rapt
to-day,
Than of old we saw you.
“Oh, I track the fairest
fair
Through new haunts of
pleasure;
Footprints here and
echoes there
Guide me to my treasure:
“Lo! she turns—immortal
youth
Wrought to mortal stature,
Fresh as starlight’s
aged truth—
Many-named Nature!”
A great historian, as he insisted on calling himself,
who had the happiness to be dead a hundred and twenty
years ago, and so to take his place among the colossi
whose huge legs our living pettiness is observed to
walk under, glories in his copious remarks and digressions
as the least imitable part of his work, and especially
in those initial chapters to the successive books of
his history, where he seems to bring his armchair
to the proscenium and chat with us in all the lusty
ease of his fine English. But Fielding lived
when the days were longer (for time, like money, is
measured by our needs), when summer afternoons were
spacious, and the clock ticked slowly in the winter
evenings. We belated historians must not linger
after his example; and if we did so, it is probable
that our chat would be thin and eager, as if delivered
from a campstool in a parrot-house. I at least
have so much to do in unraveling certain human lots,
and seeing how they were woven and interwoven, that
all the light I can command must be concentrated on
this particular web, and not dispersed over that tempting
range of relevancies called the universe.
At present I have to make the new settler Lydgate
better known to any one interested in him than he
could possibly be even to those who had seen the most
of him since his arrival in Middlemarch. For
surely all must admit that a man may be puffed and
belauded, envied, ridiculed, counted upon as a tool
and fallen in love with, or at least selected as a
future husband, and yet remain virtually unknown—
known merely as a cluster of signs for his neighbors’
false suppositions. There was a general impression,
however, that Lydgate was not altogether a common
country doctor, and in Middlemarch at that time such
an impression was significant of great things being
expected from him. For everybody’s family
doctor was remarkably clever, and was understood to
have immeasurable skill in the management and training
of the most skittish or vicious diseases. The
evidence of his cleverness was of the higher intuitive
order, lying in his lady-patients’ immovable
conviction, and was unassailable by any objection except
that their intuitions were opposed by others equally
strong; each lady who saw medical truth in Wrench
and “the strengthening treatment” regarding
Toller and “the lowering system” as medical
perdition. For the heroic times of copious bleeding
and blistering had not yet departed, still less the
