"But we Middlemarchers are not so tame as you take us to be. We have
our intrigues and our parties. I am a party man, for example, and
Bulstrode is another. If you vote for me you will offend Bulstrode."
"What is there against Bulstrode?" said Lydgate, emphatically.
"I did not say there was anything against him except that. If you vote
against him you will make him your enemy."
"I don't know that I need mind about that," said Lydgate, rather
proudly; "but he seems to have good ideas about hospitals, and he
spends large sums on useful public objects. He might help me a good
deal in carrying out my ideas. As to his religious notions--why, as
Voltaire said, incantations will destroy a flock of sheep if
administered with a certain quantity of arsenic. I look for the man
who will bring the arsenic, and don't mind about his incantations."
"Very good. But then you must not offend your arsenic-man. You will
not offend me, you know," said Mr. Farebrother, quite unaffectedly. "I
don't translate my own convenience into other people's duties. I am
opposed to Bulstrode in many ways. I don't like the set he belongs to:
they are a narrow ignorant set, and do more to make their neighbors
uncomfortable than to make them better. Their system is a sort of
worldly-spiritual cliqueism: they really look on the rest of mankind as
a doomed carcass which is to nourish them for heaven. But," he added,
smilingly, "I don't say that Bulstrode's new hospital is a bad thing;
and as to his wanting to oust me from the old one--why, if he thinks me
a mischievous fellow, he is only returning a compliment. And I am not
a model clergyman--only a decent makeshift."
Lydgate was not at all sure that the Vicar maligned himself. A model
clergyman, like a model doctor, ought to think his own profession the
finest in the world, and take all knowledge as mere nourishment to his
moral pathology and therapeutics. He only said, "What reason does
Bulstrode give for superseding you?"
"That I don't teach his opinions--which he calls spiritual religion;
and that I have no time to spare. Both statements are true. But then
I could make time, and I should be glad of the forty pounds. That is
the plain fact of the case. But let us dismiss it. I only wanted to
tell you that if you vote for your arsenic-man, you are not to cut me
in consequence. I can't spare you. You are a sort of circumnavigator
come to settle among us, and will keep up my belief in the antipodes.
Now tell me all about them in Paris."