m that hour Lydgate felt the growth of an
intellectual passion.

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 "makdom
and her fairnesse," never weary of listening to the twanging of the old
Troubadour strings, and are comparatively uninterested in that other
kind of "makdom and fairnesse" which must be wooed with industrious
thought and patient renunciation of small desires? In the story of
this passion, too, the development varies: sometimes it is the glorious
marriage, sometimes frustration and final parting. And not seldom the
catastrophe is bound up with the other passion, sung by the
Troubadours. For in the multitude of middle-aged men who go about
their vocations in a daily course determined for them much in the same
way as the tie of their cravats, there is always a good number who once
meant to shape their own deeds and alter the world a little. The story
of their coming to be shapen after the average and fit to be packed by
the gross, is hardly ever told even in their consciousness; for perhaps
their ardor in generous unpaid toil cooled as imperceptibly as the
ardor of other youthful loves, till one day their earlier self walked
like a ghost in its old home and made the new furniture ghastly.
Nothing in the world more subtle than the process of their gradual
change! In the beginning they inhaled it unknowingly: you and I may
have sent some of our breath towards infecting them, when we uttered
our conforming falsities or drew our silly conclusions: or perhaps it
came with the vibrations from a woman's glance.

Lydgate did not mean to be one of those failures, and there was the
better hope of him because his scientific interest soon took the form
of a professional enthusiasm: he had a youthful belief in his
bread-winning work, not to be stifled by that initiation in makeshift
called his 'prentice days; and he carried to his studies in London,
Edinburgh, and Paris, the conviction that the medical profession as it
might be was the finest in the world; presenting the most perfect
interchange between science and art; offering the most direct alliance
between intellectual conquest and the social good. Lydgate's nature
demanded this combination: he was an emotional creature, with a
flesh-an