od of the world is partly
dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you
and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived
faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

The influence of social environment is also presented in _Felix Holt_ as a
chief determining agent in the lives of individuals. However high the aims
and noble the purposes of the individual, he must succumb to those social
influences which are more powerful than he. In the third chapter we are
told that--

This history is chiefly concerned with the private lot of a few men
and women; but there is no private life which has not been determined
by a wider public life, from the time when the primeval milkmaid had
to wander with the wanderings of her clan, because the cow she
milked was one of a herd which had made the pastures bare. Even
in that conservatory existence where the fair Camelia is sighed
for by the noble young Pineapple, neither of them needing to care
about the frost or rain outside, there is a nether apparatus of
hot-water pipes liable to cool down on a strike of the gardeners or
a scarcity of coal. And the lives we are about to look back upon do
not belong to those conservatory species; they are rooted in the
common earth, having to endure all the ordinary chances of past and
present weather. As to the weather of 1832, the Zadkiel of that time
had predicted that the electrical condition of the clouds in the
political hemisphere would produce unusual perturbations in organic
existence, and he would perhaps have seen a fulfilment of his
remarkable prophecy in that mutual influence of dissimilar destinies
which we shall see gradually unfolding itself. For if the mixed
political conditions of Treby Magna had not been acted on by the
passing of the Reform Bill, Mr. Harold Transome would not have
presented himself as a candidate for North Loamshire, Treby would
not have been a polling-place, Mr. Matthew Jermyn would not have
been on affable terms with a Dissenting preacher and his flock, and
the venerable town would not have been placarded with handbills,
more or less complimentary and retrospective--conditions in this
case essential to the "where" and the "what," without which, as the
learned know, there can be no event whatever.

In the case of Lydgate, if the ambition was l