ess noble and pure, the fall
was greater, and the disaster sadder to contemplate. He, too, was hindered
by his "environment," but it was much more of his own creating, the result
of his own nature, than in the case of Dorothea. We are told that "he was
fired with the possibility that he might work out the proof of an
anatomical conception, and make a link in the chain of discovery." That he
was fully capable of achieving such a result is made to appear by the
author. The account given of the discovery he wished to make, abundantly
confirms this opinion of him; it also shows how large was George Eliot's
learning, and how well she could use it for the novelist's purposes.

To show how a person capable of such work could be entangled in the
ordinary affairs of life and lose sight of his youthful vision, or at least
the power of realizing it, is the purpose developed in the career of
Lydgate. There were "spots of commonness" in his nature. These--

lay in the complexion of his prejudices, which, in spite of noble
intention and sympathy, were half of them such as are found in ordinary
men of the world: that distinction of mind which belonged to his
intellectual ardor did not penetrate his feeling and judgment about
furniture, or women, or the desirability of its being known (without
his telling) that he was better born than other country surgeons.

The egotism of his nature, his incapacity for hard, severe economy and the
exclusion of luxury and refined pleasure, proved his destruction. Along
with this egotism went a too susceptible impressiveness in the presence of
beautiful women of soft, delicate ways. He meant to do great things in
science, but he could not endure the discipline, the sacrifice, the long
years of waiting, by which the great result was to be attained. Even if he
could have done this, he lost the power of doing it through the social
environment of marriage. How a man's love for a woman may corrupt the
heroic purposes of his life is hinted at in one of the paragraphs in which
George Eliot describes Lydgate, and the vision which enamoured his young
life until the woman turned all his gold into dross.

We are not afraid of telling over and over again how a man comes to
fall in love with a woman and be wedded to her, or else be fatally
parted from her. Is it due to excess of poetry or of stupidity that we
are never weary of describing what King James called a woman's "ma