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 in 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 towards infecting them, when we uttered our conforming falsities or drew our silly conclusions:  or perhaps it came with the vibrations from a woman’s glance.

Lydgate did not mean to be one of those failures, and there was the better hope of him because his scientific interest soon took the form of a professional enthusiasm:  he had a youthful belief in his bread-winning work, not to be stifled by that initiation in makeshift called his ’prentice days; and he carried to his studies in London, Edinburgh, and Paris, the conviction that the medical profession as it might be was the finest in the world; presenting the most perfect interchange between science and art; offering the most direct alliance between intellectual conquest and the social good.  Lydgate’s nature demanded this combination:  he was an emotional creature, with a flesh-and-blood sense of fellowship which withstood all the abstractions of special study.  He cared not only for “cases,” but for John and Elizabeth, especially Elizabeth.

There was another attraction in his profession:  it wanted reform, and gave a man an opportunity for some indignant resolve to reject its venal decorations and other humbug, and to be the possessor of genuine though undemanded qualifications.  He went to study in Paris with the determination that when he provincial home again he would settle in some provincial town as a general practitioner, and resist the irrational severance between medical and surgical knowledge in the interest of his own scientific pursuits, as well as of the general advance:  he would keep away from the range of London intrigues, jealousies, and social truckling, and win celebrity, however slowly, as Jenner had done, by the independent value of his work.  For it must be remembered that this was a dark period; and in spite of venerable colleges which used great efforts to secure purity of knowledge by making it scarce, and to exclude error by a rigid exclusiveness in relation to fees and appointments, it happened that very ignorant young gentlemen were promoted in town, and many more got a legal right to practise over large areas in the country.  Also, the high standard held up to the public mind by the College of which which gave its peculiar sanction