rection, which must not be fired on
with blank-cartridge, but have its blood drawn at once. The
strengtheners and the lowerers were all "clever" men in somebody's
opinion, which is really as much as can be said for any living talents.
Nobody's imagination had gone so far as to conjecture that Mr. Lydgate
could know as much as Dr. Sprague and Dr. Minchin, the two physicians,
who alone could offer any hope when danger was extreme, and when the
smallest hope was worth a guinea. Still, I repeat, there was a general
impression that Lydgate was something rather more uncommon than any
general practitioner in Middlemarch. And this was true. He was but
seven-and-twenty, an age at which many men are not quite common--at
which they are hopeful of achievement, resolute in avoidance, thinking
that Mammon shall never put a bit in their mouths and get astride their
backs, but rather that Mammon, if they have anything to do with him,
shall draw their chariot.

He had been left an orphan when he was fresh from a public school. His
father, a military man, had made but little provision for three
children, and when the boy Tertius asked to have a medical education,
it seemed easier to his guardians to grant his request by apprenticing
him to a country practitioner than to make any objections on the score
of family dignity. He was one of the rarer lads who early get a
decided bent and make up their minds that there is something particular
in life which they would like to do for its own sake, and not because
their fathers did it. Most of us who turn to any subject with love
remember some morning or evening hour when we got on a high stool to
reach down an untried volume, or sat with parted lips listening to a
new talker, or for very lack of books began to listen to the voices
within, as the first traceable beginning of our love. Something of
that sort happened to Lydgate. He was a quick fellow, and when hot
from play, would toss himself in a corner, and in five minutes be deep
in any sort of book that he could lay his hands on: if it were Rasselas
or Gulliver, so much the better, but Bailey's Dictionary would do, or
the Bible with the Apocrypha in it. Something he must read, when he
was not riding the pony, or running and hunting, or listening to the
talk of men. All this was true of him at ten years of age; he had then
read through "Chrysal, or the Adventures of a Guinea," which was
neither milk for babes, nor any chalky mixture