is irons, trying to make
people straight when the Almighty had made them crooked."

"No, no," said Mr. Toller, "Cheshire was all right--all fair and above
board. But there's St. John Long--that's the kind of fellow we call a
charlatan, advertising cures in ways nobody knows anything about: a
fellow who wants to make a noise by pretending to go deeper than other
people. The other day he was pretending to tap a man's brain and get
quicksilver out of it."

"Good gracious! what dreadful trifling with people's constitutions!"
said Mrs. Taft.

After this, it came to be held in various quarters that Lydgate played
even with respectable constitutions for his own purposes, and how much
more likely that in his flighty experimenting he should make sixes and
sevens of hospital patients. Especially it was to be expected, as the
landlady of the Tankard had said, that he would recklessly cut up their
dead bodies. For Lydgate having attended Mrs. Goby, who died
apparently of a heart-disease not very clearly expressed in the
symptoms, too daringly asked leave of her relatives to open the body,
and thus gave an offence quickly spreading beyond Parley Street, where
that lady had long resided on an income such as made this association
of her body with the victims of Burke and Hare a flagrant insult to her
memory.

Affairs were in this stage when Lydgate opened the subject of the
Hospital to Dorothea. We see that he was bearing enmity and silly
misconception with much spirit, aware that they were partly created by
his good share of success.

"They will not drive me away," he said, talking confidentially in Mr.
Farebrother's study. "I have got a good opportunity here, for the ends
I care most about; and I am pretty sure to get income enough for our
wants. By-and-by I shall go on as quietly as possible: I have no
seductions now away from home and work. And I am more and more
convinced that it will be possible to demonstrate the homogeneous
origin of all the tissues. Raspail and others are on the same track,
and I have been losing time."

"I have no power of prophecy there," said Mr. Farebrother, who had been
puffing at his pipe thoughtfully while Lydgate talked; "but as to the
hostility in the town, you'll weather it if you are prudent."

"How am I to be prudent?" said Lydgate, "I just do what comes before me
to do. I can't help people's ignorance and spite, any more than
Vesalius could. It isn't possible to square one's c