MIDDLEMARCH (Completed)

Chapter 45

It is the humor of many heads to extol the days of their

forefathers, and declaim against the wickedness of times

present. Which notwithstanding they cannot handsomely do,

without the borrowed help and satire of times past;

condemning the vices of their own times, by the expressions

of vices in times which they commend, which cannot but argue

the community of vice in both. Horace, therefore, Juvenal,

and Persius, were no prophets, although their lines did seem

to indigitate and point at our times.--SIR THOMAS BROWNE:

Pseudodoxia Epidemica.

That opposition to the New Fever Hospital which Lydgate had sketched

to Dorothea was, like other oppositions, to be viewed in many

different lights. He regarded it as a mixture of jealousy and

dunderheaded prejudice. Mr. Bulstrode saw in it not only medical

jealousy but a determination to thwart himself, prompted mainly

by a hatred of that vital religion of which he had striven to be

an effectual lay representative--a hatred which certainly found

pretexts apart from religion such as were only too easy to find

in the entanglements of human action. These might be called the

ministerial views. But oppositions have the illimitable range of

objections at command, which need never stop short at the boundary

of knowledge, but can draw forever on the vasts of ignorance.

What the opposition in Middlemarch said about the New Hospital

and its administration had certainly a great deal of echo in it,

for heaven has taken care that everybody shall not be an originator;

but there were differences which represented every social shade

between the polished moderation of Dr. Minchin and the trenchant

assertion of Mrs. Dollop, the landlady of the Tankard in Slaughter Lane.

Mrs. Dollop became more and more convinced by her own asseveration,

that Dr. Lydgate meant to let the people die in the Hospital,

if not to poison them, for the sake of cutting them up without

saying by your leave or with your leave; for it was a known "fac"

that he had wanted to cut up Mrs. Goby, as respectable a woman

as any in Parley Street, who had money in trust before her marriage--

a poor tale for a doctor, who if he was good for anything should know

what was the matter with you before you died, and not want to pry

into your inside after you were gone. If that was not reason,

Mrs. Dollop wished to know what was; but there was a prevalent feeling

in her audience that her opinion was a bulwark, and that if it were

overthrown there would be no limits to the cutting-up of bodies,