“I hope he is not one of your great heroes,” said Rosamond, half playfully, half anxiously, “else I shall have you getting up in the night to go to St. Peter’s churchyard.  You know how angry you told me the people were about Mrs. Goby.  You have enemies enough already.”

“So had Vesalius, Rosy.  No wonder the medical fogies in Middlemarch are jealous, when some of the greatest doctors living were fierce upon Vesalius because they had believed in Galen, and he showed that Galen was wrong.  They called him a liar and a poisonous monster.  But the facts of the human frame were on his side; and so he got the better of them.”

“And what happened to him afterwards?” said Rosamond, with some interest.

“Oh, he had a good deal of fighting to the last.  And they did exasperate him enough at one time to make him burn a good deal of his work.  Then he got shipwrecked just as he was coming from Jerusalem to take a great chair at Padua.  He died rather miserably.”

There was a moment’s pause before Rosamond said, “Do you know, Tertius, I often wish you had not been a medical man.”

“Nay, Rosy, don’t say that,” said Lydgate, drawing her closer to him.  “That is like saying you wish you had married another man.”

“Not at all; you are clever enough for anything:  you might easily have been something else.  And your cousins at Quallingham all think that you have sunk below them in your choice of a profession.”

“The cousins at Quallingham may go to the devil!” said Lydgate, with scorn.  “It was like their impudence if they said anything of the sort to you.”

“Still,” said Rosamond, “I do not think it is a nice profession, dear.”  We know that she had much quiet perseverance in her opinion.

“It is the grandest profession in the world, Rosamond,” said Lydgate, gravely.  “And to say that you love me without loving the medical man in me, is the same sort of thing as to say that you like eating a peach but don’t like its flavor.  Don’t say that again, dear, it pains me.”

“Very well, Doctor Grave-face,” said Rosy, dimpling, “I will declare in future that I dote on skeletons, and body-snatchers, and bits of things in phials, and quarrels with everybody, that end in your dying miserably.”

“No, no, not so bad as that,” said Lydgate, giving up remonstrance and petting her resignedly.

CHAPTER XLVI.

Pues no podemos haber aquello que queremos, queramos
aquello que podremos.

Since we cannot get what we like, let us like
what we can get. 
—­Spanish Proverb.

While Lydgate, safely married and with the Hospital under his command, felt himself struggling for Medical Reform against Middlemarch, Middlemarch was becoming more and more conscious of the national struggle for another kind of Reform.