She did mention it that evening, and said that she should like to subscribe two hundred a-year—­she had seven hundred a-year as the equivalent of her own fortune, settled on her at her marriage.  Mr. Casaubon made no objection beyond a passing remark that the sum might be disproportionate in relation to other good objects, but when Dorothea in her ignorance resisted that suggestion, he acquiesced.  He did not care himself about spending money, and was not reluctant to give it.  If he ever felt keenly any question of money it was through the medium of another passion than the love of material property.

Dorothea told him that she had seen Lydgate, and recited the gist of her conversation with him about the Hospital.  Mr. Casaubon did not question her further, but he felt sure that she had wished to know what had passed between Lydgate and himself “She knows that I know,” said the ever-restless voice within; but that increase of tacit knowledge only thrust further off any confidence between them.  He distrusted her affection; and what loneliness is more lonely than distrust?

CHAPTER XLV.

It is the humor of many heads to extol the days of their forefathers, and declaim against the wickedness of times present.  Which notwithstanding they cannot handsomely do, without the borrowed help and satire of times past; condemning the vices of their own times, by the expressions of vices in times which they commend, which cannot but argue the community of vice in both.  Horace, therefore, Juvenal, and Persius, were no prophets, although their lines did seem to indigitate and point at our times.—­SIR THOMAS BROWNE:  Pseudodoxia Epidemica.

That opposition to the New Fever Hospital which Lydgate had sketched to Dorothea was, like other oppositions, to be viewed in many different lights.  He regarded it as a mixture of jealousy and dunderheaded prejudice.  Mr. Bulstrode saw in it not only medical jealousy but a determination to thwart himself, prompted mainly by a hatred of that vital religion of which he had striven to be an effectual lay representative—­a hatred which certainly found pretexts apart from religion such as were only too easy to find in the entanglements of human action.  These might be called the ministerial views.  But oppositions have the illimitable range of objections at command, which need never stop short at the boundary of knowledge, but can draw forever on the vasts of ignorance.  What the opposition in Middlemarch said about the New Hospital and its administration had certainly a great deal of echo in it, for heaven has taken care that everybody shall not be an originator; but there were differences which represented every social shade between the polished moderation of Dr. Minchin and the trenchant assertion of Mrs. Dollop, the landlady of the Tankard in Slaughter Lane.