But Lydgate had not been long in the town before there were particulars enough reported of him to breed much more specific expectations and to intensify differences into partisanship; some of the particulars being of that impressive order of which the significance is entirely hidden, like a statistical amount without a standard of comparison, but with a note of exclamation at the end.  The cubic feet of oxygen yearly swallowed by a full-grown man—­ what a shudder they might have created in some Middlemarch circles!  “Oxygen! nobody knows what that may be—­is it any wonder the cholera has got to Dantzic?  And yet there are people who say quarantine is no good!”

One of the facts quickly rumored was that Lydgate did not dispense drugs.  This was offensive both to the physicians whose exclusive distinction seemed infringed on, and to the surgeon-apothecaries with whom he ranged himself; and only a little while before, they might have counted on having the law on their side against a man who without calling himself a London-made M.D. dared to ask for pay except as a charge on drugs.  But Lydgate had not been experienced enough to foresee that his new course would be even more offensive to the laity; and to Mr. Mawmsey, an important grocer in the Top Market, who, though not one of his patients, questioned him in an affable manner on the subject, he was injudicious enough to give a hasty popular explanation of his reasons, pointing out to Mr. Mawmsey that it must lower the character of practitioners, and be a constant injury to the public, if their only mode of getting paid for their work was by their making out long bills for draughts, boluses, and mixtures.

“It is in that way that hard-working medical men may come to be almost as mischievous as quacks,” said Lydgate, rather thoughtlessly.  “To get their own bread they must overdose the king’s lieges; and that’s a bad sort of treason, Mr. Mawmsey—­undermines the constitution in a fatal way.”

Mr. Mawmsey was not only an overseer (it was about a question of outdoor pay that he was having an interview with Lydgate), he was also asthmatic and had an increasing family:  thus, from a medical point of view, as well as from his own, he was an important man; indeed, an exceptional grocer, whose hair was arranged in a flame-like pyramid, and whose retail deference was of the cordial, encouraging kind—­jocosely complimentary, and with a certain considerate abstinence from letting out the full force of his mind.  It was Mr. Mawmsey’s friendly jocoseness in questioning him which had set the tone of Lydgate’s reply.  But let the wise be warned against too great readiness at explanation:  it multiplies the sources of mistake, lengthening the sum for reckoners sure to go wrong.