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.