MIDDLEMARCH (Completed)

Chapter 2

"'Dime; no ves aquel caballero que hacia nosotros viene

sobre un caballo rucio rodado que trae puesto en la cabeza

un yelmo de oro?' 'Lo que veo y columbro,' respondio Sancho,

'no es sino un hombre sobre un as no pardo como el mio, que

trae sobre la cabeza una cosa que relumbra.' 'Pues ese es el

yelmo de Mambrino,' dijo Don Quijote."--CERVANTES.

"'Seest thou not yon cavalier who cometh toward us on a

dapple-gray steed, and weareth a golden helmet?' 'What I

see,' answered Sancho, 'is nothing but a man on a gray ass

like my own, who carries something shiny on his head.' 'Just

so,' answered Don Quixote: 'and that resplendent object is

the helmet of Mambrino.'"

"Sir Humphry Davy?" said Mr. Brooke, over the soup, in his easy

smiling way, taking up Sir James Chettam's remark that he was studying

Davy's Agricultural Chemistry. "Well, now, Sir Humphry Davy;

I dined with him years ago at Cartwright's, and Wordsworth was there

too--the poet Wordsworth, you know. Now there was something singular.

I was at Cambridge when Wordsworth was there, and I never met him--and

I dined with him twenty years afterwards at Cartwright's. There's

an oddity in things, now. But Davy was there: he was a poet too.

Or, as I may say, Wordsworth was poet one, and Davy was poet two.

That was true in every sense, you know."

Dorothea felt a little more uneasy than usual. In the beginning

of dinner, the party being small and the room still, these motes from

the mass of a magistrate's mind fell too noticeably. She wondered

how a man like Mr. Casaubon would support such triviality. His manners,

she thought, were very dignified; the set of his iron-gray hair

and his deep eye-sockets made him resemble the portrait of Locke.

He had the spare form and the pale complexion which became a student;

as different as possible from the blooming Englishman of the

red-whiskered type represented by Sir James Chettam.

"I am reading the Agricultural Chemistry," said this excellent baronet,

"because I am going to take one of the farms into my own hands,

and see if something cannot be done in setting a good pattern

of farming among my tenants. Do you approve of that, Miss Brooke?"

"A great mistake, Chettam," interposed Mr. Brooke, "going into

electrifying your land and that kind of thing, and making a parlor

of your cow-house. It won't do. I went into science a great deal

myself at one time; but I saw it would not do. It leads to everything;

you can let nothing alone. No, no--see that your tenants don't sell