This history is chiefly concerned with the private lot of a few men and women; but there is no private life which has not been determined by a wider public life, from the time when the primeval milkmaid had to wander with the wanderings of her clan, because the cow she milked was one of a herd which had made the pastures bare.  Even in that conservatory existence where the fair Camelia is sighed for by the noble young Pineapple, neither of them needing to care about the frost or rain outside, there is a nether apparatus of hot-water pipes liable to cool down on a strike of the gardeners or a scarcity of coal.  And the lives we are about to look back upon do not belong to those conservatory species; they are rooted in the common earth, having to endure all the ordinary chances of past and present weather.  As to the weather of 1832, the Zadkiel of that time had predicted that the electrical condition of the clouds in the political hemisphere would produce unusual perturbations in organic existence, and he would perhaps have seen a fulfilment of his remarkable prophecy in that mutual influence of dissimilar destinies which we shall see gradually unfolding itself.  For if the mixed political conditions of Treby Magna had not been acted on by the passing of the Reform Bill, Mr. Harold Transome would not have presented himself as a candidate for North Loamshire, Treby would not have been a polling-place, Mr. Matthew Jermyn would not have been on affable terms with a Dissenting preacher and his flock, and the venerable town would not have been placarded with handbills, more or less complimentary and retrospective—­conditions in this case essential to the “where” and the “what,” without which, as the learned know, there can be no event whatever.

In the case of Lydgate, if the ambition was less noble and pure, the fall was greater, and the disaster sadder to contemplate.  He, too, was hindered by his “environment,” but it was much more of his own creating, the result of his own nature, than in the case of Dorothea.  We are told that “he was fired with the possibility that he might work out the proof of an anatomical conception, and make a link in the chain of discovery.”  That he was fully capable of achieving such a result is made to appear by the author.  The account given of the discovery he wished to make, abundantly confirms this opinion of him; it also shows how large was George Eliot’s learning, and how well she could use it for the novelist’s purposes.

To show how a person capable of such work could be entangled in the ordinary affairs of life and lose sight of his youthful vision, or at least the power of realizing it, is the purpose developed in the career of Lydgate.  There were “spots of commonness” in his nature.  These—­