ctice than was common. He
was ambitious of a wider effect: 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.

Does it seem incongruous to you that a Middlemarch surgeon should dream
of himself as a discoverer? Most of us, indeed, know little of the
great originators until they have been lifted up among the
constellations and already rule our fates. But that Herschel, for
example, who "broke the barriers of the heavens"--did he not once play
a provincial church-organ, and give music-lessons to stumbling
pianists? Each of those Shining Ones had to walk on the earth among
neighbors who perhaps thought much more of his gait and his garments
than of anything which was to give him a title to everlasting fame:
each of them had his little local personal history sprinkled with small
temptations and sordid cares, which made the retarding friction of his
course towards final companionship with the immortals. Lydgate was not
blind to the dangers of such friction, but he had plenty of confidence
in his resolution to avoid it as far as possible: being
seven-and-twenty, he felt himself experienced. And he was not going to
have his vanities provoked by contact with the showy worldly successes
of the capital, but to live among people who could hold no rivalry with
that pursuit of a great idea which was to be a twin object with the
assiduous practice of his profession. There was fascination in the
hope that the two purposes would illuminate each other: the careful
observation and inference which was his daily work, the use of the lens
to further his judgment in special cases, would further his thought as
an instrument of larger inquiry. Was not this the typical pre-eminence
of his profession? He would be a good Middlemarch doctor, and by that
very means keep himself in the track of far-reaching investigation. On
one point he may fairly claim approval at this particular stage of his
career: he did not mean to imitate those philanthropic models who make
a profit out of poisonous pickles to support themselves while they are
exposing adulteration, or hold shares in a gambling-hell that they may
have leisure to represent the cause of public morality. He intended to
begin in his own case some particular reforms which were quite
certainly within his reach, and much less of a problem than the
demonstrating of an anatomical conception. One of these