Lydgate, Tertius

A talented young doctor with a great enthusiasm for the best in his profession. "One of Lydgate's gifts was a voice habitually deep and sonorous, yet capable of becoming very low and gentle at the right moment. About his ordinary bearing there was a certain fling, a fearless expectation of success, aconfidence in his own powers and integrity, much fortified by contempt for petty obstacles or seductions of which he had had no experience. But this proud openness was made lovable by an expression of unaffected good will." "His scientific interest soon took the form of a professional enthusiasm; he had a youthful belief in his bread-winning work . . . and he carried to his studies . . . the conviction that the medical profession as it might be was the finest in the world . . . But he did not simply aim at a more genuine kind of practice than was common. He was ambitious of a wider effect : he was fired with the possibility that he might work out the proof of an anatomical conception and make a link in the chain of discovery . . . Lydgate was ambitious above all to contribute towards enlarging the scientific, rational basis of his profession." He settles in Middlemarch, intending not only to be a good doctor, but also to carry on scientific investigation, for which he is well fitted. Captivated by Rosamond Vincy's beauty and grace, he marries her and soon discovers that she is absolutely selfish and unresponsive to his tender love, with no sympathy for his high aims. His opposition to accepted medical usages makes him unpopular with the other physicians of Middlemarch, and his connexion with Mr. Bulstrode leads him into trouble. His wife has only blame for him, and all his endeavours to economize are stubbornly opposed by her. The struggle between him and Rosamond, who demands position and luxury at any price, ends in the subjection of his higher self, and his noblest aims are sacrificed to worldly success. To meet the demands of her ambition he is forced to move to London, and become a fashionable physician, and dies there at a comparatively early age. The high-minded, medical side of Lydgate is said to have been drawn from the Rt. Hon. Sir T. Clifford Allbutt, Regius Professor of Physic, Cambridge, who, when Middlemarch was written, was head of the Leeds Fever Hospital which George Eliot visited. The portraiture is but partial and the circumstances different. (Manuscript notes.) George Eliot's friend and biographer, Mr. Oscar Browning, has also been suggested as the prototype, in part. (Browning, Memories of Sixty Years, p. 193.)

<em>Middlemarch</em>

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