times of thorough-going theory, when disease in general was called by some bad name, and treated accordingly without shilly-shally—­as if, for example, it were to be called insurrection, which must not be fired on with blank-cartridge, but have its blood drawn at once.  The strengtheners and the lowerers were all “clever” men in somebody’s opinion, which is really as much as can be said for any living talents.  Nobody’s imagination had gone so far as to conjecture that Mr. Lydgate could know as much as Dr. Sprague and Dr. Minchin, the two physicians, who alone could offer any hope when danger was extreme, and when the smallest hope was worth a guinea.  Still, I repeat, there was a general impression that Lydgate was something rather more uncommon than any general practitioner in Middlemarch.  And this was true.  He was but seven-and-twenty, an age at which many men are not quite common—­at which they are hopeful of achievement, resolute in avoidance, thinking that Mammon shall never put a bit in their mouths and get astride their backs, but rather that Mammon, if they have anything to do with him, shall draw their chariot.

He had been left an orphan when he was fresh from a public school.  His father, a military man, had made but little provision for three children, and when the boy Tertius asked to have a medical education, it seemed easier to his guardians to grant his request by apprenticing him to a country practitioner than to make any objections on the score of family dignity.  He was one of the rarer lads who early get a decided bent and make up their minds that there is something particular in life which they would like to do for its own sake, and not because their fathers did it.  Most of us who turn to any subject with love remember some morning or evening hour when we got on a high stool to reach down an untried volume, or sat with parted lips listening to a new talker, or for very lack of books began to listen to the voices within, as the first traceable beginning of our love.  Something of that sort happened to Lydgate.  He was a quick fellow, and when hot from play, would toss himself in a corner, and in five minutes be deep in any sort of book that he could lay his hands on:  if it were Rasselas or Gulliver, so much the better, but Bailey’s Dictionary would do, or the Bible with the Apocrypha in it.  Something he must read, when he was not riding the pony, or running and hunting, or listening to the talk of men.  All this was true of him at ten years of age; he had then read through “Chrysal, or the Adventures of a Guinea,” which was neither milk for babes, nor any chalky mixture meant to pass for milk, and it had already occurred to him that books were stuff, and that life was stupid.  His school studies had not much modified that opinion, for though he “did” his classics and mathematics, he was not pre-eminent in them.  It was said of him, that Lydgate could do anything he liked, but he had certainly not yet liked to do anything remarkable.