our living pettiness is
observed to walk under, glories in his copious remarks and digressions
as the least imitable part of his work, and especially in those initial
chapters to the successive books of his history, where he seems to
bring his armchair to the proscenium and chat with us in all the lusty
ease of his fine English. But Fielding lived when the days were longer
(for time, like money, is measured by our needs), when summer
afternoons were spacious, and the clock ticked slowly in the winter
evenings. We belated historians must not linger after his example; and
if we did so, it is probable that our chat would be thin and eager, as
if delivered from a campstool in a parrot-house. I at least have so
much to do in unraveling certain human lots, and seeing how they were
woven and interwoven, that all the light I can command must be
concentrated on this particular web, and not dispersed over that
tempting range of relevancies called the universe.

At present I have to make the new settler Lydgate better known to any
one interested in him than he could possibly be even to those who had
seen the most of him since his arrival in Middlemarch. For surely all
must admit that a man may be puffed and belauded, envied, ridiculed,
counted upon as a tool and fallen in love with, or at least selected as
a future husband, and yet remain virtually unknown--known merely as a
cluster of signs for his neighbors' false suppositions. There was a
general impression, however, that Lydgate was not altogether a common
country doctor, and in Middlemarch at that time such an impression was
significant of great things being expected from him. For everybody's
family doctor was remarkably clever, and was understood to have
immeasurable skill in the management and training of the most skittish
or vicious diseases. The evidence of his cleverness was of the higher
intuitive order, lying in his lady-patients' immovable conviction, and
was unassailable by any objection except that their intuitions were
opposed by others equally strong; each lady who saw medical truth in
Wrench and "the strengthening treatment" regarding Toller and "the
lowering system" as medical perdition. For the heroic times of copious
bleeding and blistering had not yet departed, still less the times of
thorough-going theory, when disease in general was called by some bad
name, and treated accordingly without shilly-shally--as if, for
example, it were to be called insur