lay in the complexion of his prejudices, which, in spite of noble intention and sympathy, were half of them such as are found in ordinary men of the world:  that distinction of mind which belonged to his intellectual ardor did not penetrate his feeling and judgment about furniture, or women, or the desirability of its being known (without his telling) that he was better born than other country surgeons.

The egotism of his nature, his incapacity for hard, severe economy and the exclusion of luxury and refined pleasure, proved his destruction.  Along with this egotism went a too susceptible impressiveness in the presence of beautiful women of soft, delicate ways.  He meant to do great things in science, but he could not endure the discipline, the sacrifice, the long years of waiting, by which the great result was to be attained.  Even if he could have done this, he lost the power of doing it through the social environment of marriage.  How a man’s love for a woman may corrupt the heroic purposes of his life is hinted at in one of the paragraphs in which George Eliot describes Lydgate, and the vision which enamoured his young life until the woman turned all his gold into dross.

We are not afraid of telling over and over again how a man comes to fall in love with a woman and be wedded to her, or else be fatally parted from her.  Is it due to excess of poetry or of stupidity that we are never weary of describing what King James called a woman’s “makdom and her fairnesse,” never weary of listening to the twanging of the old Troubadour strings, and are comparatively uninterested in that other kind of “makdom and fairnesse” which must be wooed with industrious thought and renunciation of small desires?  In the story of this passion, too, the development varies:  sometimes it is the glorious marriage, sometimes frustration and final parting.  And not seldom the catastrophe is wound up with the other passion, sung by the Troubadours.  For in the multitude of middle-aged men who go about their vocations in a daily course determined for them much in the same way as the tie of their cravats, there is always a good number who once meant to shape their own deeds and alter the world a little.  The story of their coming to be shapen after the average, and fit to be packed by the gross, is hardly ever told even in their consciousness for perhaps their ardor for generous, unpaid toil cooled as imperceptibly as the ardor of other youthful loves, till one day their earlier self walked like a ghost in its old home and made the new furniture ghastly.  Nothing in the world more subtle than the process of their gradual change!  In the beginning they inhaled it unknowingly:  you and I may have sent some of our breath toward infecting them when we uttered our conforming falsities or drew our silly conclusions; or perhaps it came with the vibration from a woman’s glance.

The pathetic and saddening tragedy of a man’s