g the symptoms
of maladies and the action of medicaments. But results which depend on
human conscience and intelligence work slowly, and now at the end of
1829, most medical practice was still strutting or shambling along the
old paths, and there was still scientific work to be done which might
have seemed to be a direct sequence of Bichat's. This great seer did
not go beyond the consideration of the tissues as ultimate facts in the
living organism, marking the limit of anatomical analysis; but it was
open to another mind to say, have not these structures some common
basis from which they have all started, as your sarsnet, gauze, net,
satin, and velvet from the raw cocoon? Here would be another light, as
of oxy-hydrogen, showing the very grain of things, and revising all
former explanations. Of this sequence to Bichat's work, already
vibrating along many currents of the European mind, Lydgate was
enamoured; he longed to demonstrate the more intimate relations of
living structure, and help to define men's thought more accurately
after the true order. The work had not yet been done, but only
prepared for those who knew how to use the preparation. What was the
primitive tissue? In that way Lydgate put the question--not quite in
the way required by the awaiting answer; but such missing of the right
word befalls many seekers. And he counted on quiet intervals to be
watchfully seized, for taking up the threads of investigation--on many
hints to be won from diligent application, not only of the scalpel, but
of the microscope, which research had begun to use again with new
enthusiasm of reliance. Such was Lydgate's plan of his future: to do
good small work for Middlemarch, and great work for the world.

He was certainly a happy fellow at this time: to be seven-and-twenty,
without any fixed vices, with a generous resolution that his action
should be beneficent, and with ideas in his brain that made life
interesting quite apart from the cultus of horseflesh and other mystic
rites of costly observance, which the eight hundred pounds left him
after buying his practice would certainly not have gone far in paying
for. He was at a starting-point which makes many a man's career a fine
subject for betting, if there were any gentlemen given to that
amusement who could appreciate the complicated probabilities of an
arduous purpose, with all the possible thwartings and furtherings of
circumstance, all the niceties of inward balanc