MIDDLEMARCH (Completed)

Chapter 5

"Hard students are commonly troubled with gowts, catarrhs,

rheums, cachexia, bradypepsia, bad eyes, stone, and collick,

crudities, oppilations, vertigo, winds, consumptions, and

all such diseases as come by over-much sitting: they are

most part lean, dry, ill-colored . . . and all through

immoderate pains and extraordinary studies. If you will not

believe the truth of this, look upon great Tostatus and

Thomas Aquainas' works; and tell me whether those men took

pains."--BURTON'S Anatomy of Melancholy, P. I, s. 2.

This was Mr. Casaubon's letter.

MY DEAR MISS BROOKE,--I have your guardian's permission to address

you on a subject than which I have none more at heart. I am not,

I trust, mistaken in the recognition of some deeper correspondence

than that of date in the fact that a consciousness of need in my

own life had arisen contemporaneously with the possibility of my

becoming acquainted with you. For in the first hour of meeting you,

I had an impression of your eminent and perhaps exclusive fitness

to supply that need (connected, I may say, with such activity of the

affections as even the preoccupations of a work too special to be

abdicated could not uninterruptedly dissimulate); and each succeeding

opportunity for observation has given the impression an added

depth by convincing me more emphatically of that fitness which I

had preconceived, and thus evoking more decisively those affections

to which I have but now referred. Our conversations have, I think,

made sufficiently clear to you the tenor of my life and purposes:

a tenor unsuited, I am aware, to the commoner order of minds.

But I have discerned in you an elevation of thought and a capability

of devotedness, which I had hitherto not conceived to be compatible

either with the early bloom of youth or with those graces of sex that

may be said at once to win and to confer distinction when combined,

as they notably are in you, with the mental qualities above indicated.

It was, I confess, beyond my hope to meet with this rare combination

of elements both solid and attractive, adapted to supply aid

in graver labors and to cast a charm over vacant hours; and but

for the event of my introduction to you (which, let me again say,

I trust not to be superficially coincident with foreshadowing needs,

but providentially related thereto as stages towards the completion

of a life's plan), I should presumably have gone on to the last