MIDDLEMARCH (Completed)

Chapter 18

"Oh, sir, the loftiest hopes on earth

Draw lots with meaner hopes: heroic breasts,

Breathing bad air, ran risk of pestilence;

Or, lacking lime-juice when they cross the Line,

May languish with the scurvy."

Some weeks passed after this conversation before the question of the

chaplaincy gathered any practical import for Lydgate, and without telling

himself the reason, he deferred the predetermination on which side he

should give his vote. It would really have been a matter of total

indifference to him--that is to say, he would have taken the more

convenient side, and given his vote for the appointment of Tyke without

any hesitation--if he had not cared personally for Mr. Farebrother.

But his liking for the Vicar of St. Botolph's grew with

growing acquaintanceship. That, entering into Lydgate's position

as a new-comer who had his own professional objects to secure,

Mr. Farebrother should have taken pains rather to warn off than

to obtain his interest, showed an unusual delicacy and generosity,

which Lydgate's nature was keenly alive to. It went along with other

points of conduct in Mr. Farebrother which were exceptionally fine,

and made his character resemble those southern landscapes which seem

divided between natural grandeur and social slovenliness. Very few

men could have been as filial and chivalrous as he was to the mother,

aunt, and sister, whose dependence on him had in many ways shaped

his life rather uneasily for himself; few men who feel the pressure

of small needs are so nobly resolute not to dress up their inevitably

self-interested desires in a pretext of better motives. In these

matters he was conscious that his life would bear the closest scrutiny;

and perhaps the consciousness encouraged a little defiance towards

the critical strictness of persons whose celestial intimacies

seemed not to improve their domestic manners, and whose lofty aims

were not needed to account for their actions. Then, his preaching

was ingenious and pithy, like the preaching of the English Church

in its robust age, and his sermons were delivered without book.

People outside his parish went to hear him; and, since to fill the

church was always the most difficult part of a clergyman's function,

here was another ground for a careless sense of superiority.

Besides, he was a likable man: sweet-tempered, ready-witted, frank,

without grins of suppressed bitterness or other conversational