MIDDLEMARCH (Completed)

Chapter 67

Now is there civil war within the soul:

Resolve is thrust from off the sacred throne

By clamorous Needs, and Pride the grand-vizier

Makes humble compact, plays the supple part

Of envoy and deft-tongued apologist

For hungry rebels.

Happily Lydgate had ended by losing in the billiard-room, and brought

away no encouragement to make a raid on luck. On the contrary,

he felt unmixed disgust with himself the next day when he had to

pay four or five pounds over and above his gains, and he carried

about with him a most unpleasant vision of the figure he had made,

not only rubbing elbows with the men at the Green Dragon but behaving

just as they did. A philosopher fallen to betting is hardly

distinguishable from a Philistine under the same circumstances:

the difference will chiefly be found in his subsequent reflections,

and Lydgate chewed a very disagreeable cud in that way. His reason

told him how the affair might have been magnified into ruin by a

slight change of scenery--if it had been a gambling-house that he

had turned into, where chance could be clutched with both hands

instead of being picked up with thumb and fore-finger. Nevertheless,

though reason strangled the desire to gamble, there remained

the feeling that, with an assurance of luck to the needful amount,

he would have liked to gamble, rather than take the alternative

which was beginning to urge itself as inevitable.

That alternative was to apply to Mr. Bulstrode. Lydgate had

so many times boasted both to himself and others that he was

totally independent of Bulstrode, to whose plans he had lent

himself solely because they enabled him to carry out his own ideas

of professional work and public benefit--he had so constantly

in their personal intercourse had his pride sustained by the sense

that he was making a good social use of this predominating banker,

whose opinions he thought contemptible and whose motives often

seemed to him an absurd mixture of contradictory impressions--

that he had been creating for himself strong ideal obstacles

to the proffering of any considerable request to him on his own account.

Still, early in March his affairs were at that pass in which men begin

to say that their oaths were delivered in ignorance, and to perceive

that the act which they had called impossible to them is becoming

manifestly possible. With Dover's ugly security soon to be put