It is the humor of many heads to extol the days of their
forefathers, and declaim against the wickedness of times
present. Which notwithstanding they cannot handsomely do,
without the borrowed help and satire of times past;
condemning the vices of their own times, by the expressions
of vices in times which they commend, which cannot but argue
the community of vice in both. Horace, therefore, Juvenal,
and Persius, were no prophets, although their lines did seem
to indigitate and point at our times.--SIR THOMAS BROWNE:
Pseudodoxia Epidemica.
That opposition to the New Fever Hospital which Lydgate had sketched to
Dorothea was, like other oppositions, to be viewed in many different
lights. He regarded it as a mixture of jealousy and dunderheaded
prejudice. Mr. Bulstrode saw in it not only medical jealousy but a
determination to thwart himself, prompted mainly by a hatred of that
vital religion of which he had striven to be an effectual lay
representative--a hatred which certainly found pretexts apart from
religion such as were only too easy to find in the entanglements of
human action. These might be called the ministerial views. But
oppositions have the illimitable range of objections at command, which
need never stop short at the boundary of knowledge, but can draw
forever on the vasts of ignorance. What the opposition in Middlemarch
said about the New Hospital and its administration had certainly a
great deal of echo in it, for heaven has taken care that everybody
shall not be an originator; but there were differences which
represented every social shade between the polished moderation of Dr.
Minchin and the trenchant assertion of Mrs. Dollop, the landlady of the
Tankard in Slaughter Lane.
Mrs. Dollop became more and more convinced by her own asseveration,
that Dr. Lydgate meant to let the people die in the Hospital, if not to
poison them, for the sake of cutting them up without saying by your
leave or with your leave; for it was a known "fac" that he had wanted
to cut up Mrs. Goby, as respectable a woman as any in Parley Street,
who had money in trust before her marriage--a poor tale for a doctor,
who if he was good for anything should know what was the matter with
you before you died, and not want to pry into your inside after you
were gone. If that was not reason, Mrs. Dollop wished to know what
was; but there was a prevalent feeling in her audience that her opinion
was a bulwark, and that if it were overthrown there would be no limits
to the cutting-up of bodies, as had been well seen in Burke and Hare
with their pitch-plaisters--such a hanging business as that was not
wanted in Middlemarch!