Dorothea tried now to turn her thoughts towards immediate duties, and one of these was of a kind which others were determined to remind her of.  Lydgate’s ear had caught eagerly her mention of the living, and as soon as he could, he reopened the subject, seeing here a possibility of making amends for the casting-vote he had once given with an ill-satisfied conscience.  “Instead of telling you anything about Mr. Tyke,” he said, “I should like to speak of another man—­ Mr. Farebrother, the Vicar of St. Botolph’s.  His living is a poor one, and gives him a stinted provision for himself and his family.  His mother, aunt, and sister all live with him, and depend upon him.  I believe he has never married because of them.  I never heard such good preaching as his—­such plain, easy eloquence.  He would have done to preach at St. Paul’s Cross after old Latimer.  His talk is just as good about all subjects:  original, simple, clear.  I think him a remarkable fellow:  he ought to have done more than he has done.”

“Why has he not done more?” said Dorothea, interested now in all who had slipped below their own intention.

“That’s a hard question,” said Lydgate.  “I find myself that it’s uncommonly difficult to make the right thing work:  there are so many strings pulling at once.  Farebrother often hints that he has got into the wrong profession; he wants a wider range than that of a poor clergyman, and I suppose he has no interest to help him on.  He is very fond of Natural History and various scientific matters, and he is hampered in reconciling these tastes with his position.  He has no money to spare—­hardly enough to use; and that has led him into card-playing—­Middlemarch is a great place for whist.  He does play for money, and he wins a good deal.  Of course that takes him into company a little beneath him, and makes him slack about some things; and yet, with all that, looking at him as a whole, I think he is one of the most blameless men I ever knew.  He has neither venom nor doubleness in him, and those often go with a more correct outside.”

“I wonder whether he suffers in his conscience because of that habit,” said Dorothea; “I wonder whether he wishes he could leave it off.”

“I have no doubt he would leave it off, if he were transplanted into plenty:  he would be glad of the time for other things.”

“My uncle says that Mr. Tyke is spoken of as an apostolic man,” said Dorothea, meditatively.  She was wishing it were possible to restore the times of primitive zeal, and yet thinking of Mr. Farebrother with a strong desire to rescue him from his chance-gotten money.

“I don’t pretend to say that Farebrother is apostolic,” said Lydgate.  “His position is not quite like that of the Apostles:  he is only a parson among parishioners whose lives he has to try and make better.  Practically I find that what is called being apostolic now, is an impatience of everything in which the parson doesn’t cut the principal figure.  I see something of that in Mr. Tyke at the Hospital:  a good deal of his doctrine is a sort of pinching hard to make people uncomfortably—­aware of him.  Besides, an apostolic man at Lowick!—­he ought to think, as St. Francis did, that it is needful to preach to the birds.”