Sprague, Dr.

The senior physician of Middlemarch, a hard-headed and dry-witted man who is averse to Lydgate and his newer ideas. "The doctor was more than suspected of having no religion, but somehow Middlemarch tolerated this deficiency in him as if he had been a lord chancellor; indeed, it is probable that his professional weight was the more believed in, the world-old association of cleverness with the evil principle being still potent in the minds even of lady patients who had the strictest ideas of frilling and sentiment . . . Dr. Sprague was superfluously tall; his trousers got creased at the knees, and showed an excess of boot at a time when straps seemed necessary to any dignity of bearing; you heard him go in and out, and up and down, as if he had come to see after the roofing. In short, he had weight, and might be expected to grapple with a disease and throw it."

<em>Middlemarch</em>

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