She did mention it that evening, and said that she
should like to subscribe two hundred a-year—she
had seven hundred a-year as the equivalent of her
own fortune, settled on her at her marriage.
Mr. Casaubon made no objection beyond a passing remark
that the sum might be disproportionate in relation
to other good objects, but when Dorothea in her ignorance
resisted that suggestion, he acquiesced. He
did not care himself about spending money, and was
not reluctant to give it. If he ever felt keenly
any question of money it was through the medium of
another passion than the love of material property.
Dorothea told him that she had seen Lydgate, and recited
the gist of her conversation with him about the Hospital.
Mr. Casaubon did not question her further, but he
felt sure that she had wished to know what had passed
between Lydgate and himself “She knows that I
know,” said the ever-restless voice within;
but that increase of tacit knowledge only thrust further
off any confidence between them. He distrusted
her affection; and what loneliness is more lonely
than distrust?
CHAPTER XLV.
It is the humor of many heads to extol
the days of their forefathers, and declaim against
the wickedness of times present. Which notwithstanding
they cannot handsomely do, without the borrowed
help and satire of times past; condemning the
vices of their own times, by the expressions of
vices in times which they commend, which cannot but
argue the community of vice in both. Horace,
therefore, Juvenal, and Persius, were no prophets,
although their lines did seem to indigitate and
point at our times.—SIR THOMAS BROWNE:
Pseudodoxia Epidemica.
That opposition to the New Fever Hospital which Lydgate
had sketched to Dorothea was, like other oppositions,
to be viewed in many different lights. He regarded
it as a mixture of jealousy and dunderheaded prejudice.
Mr. Bulstrode saw in it not only medical jealousy
but a determination to thwart himself, prompted mainly
by a hatred of that vital religion of which he had
striven to be an effectual lay representative—a
hatred which certainly found pretexts apart from religion
such as were only too easy to find in the entanglements
of human action. These might be called the ministerial
views. But oppositions have the illimitable range
of objections at command, which need never stop short
at the boundary of knowledge, but can draw forever
on the vasts of ignorance. What the opposition
in Middlemarch said about the New Hospital and its
administration had certainly a great deal of echo in
it, for heaven has taken care that everybody shall
not be an originator; but there were differences which
represented every social shade between the polished
moderation of Dr. Minchin and the trenchant assertion
of Mrs. Dollop, the landlady of the Tankard in Slaughter
Lane.
