Middlemarch

Casaubon has no second attack of equal severity, and in a few days begins to recover. Lydgate — using his stethoscope, which was not yet a matter of course in practice — sits quietly by his patient and watches him. He tells Casaubon the source of the illness is the common error of intellectual men: too eager and monotonous application; the remedy is moderate work and variety of relaxation. Mr. Brooke, sitting by on one occasion, suggests fishing, like Cadwallader, and making toys, table-legs, and that kind of thing. Casaubon replies that these "would be to me such relaxation as tow-picking is to prisoners in a house of correction." Lydgate concedes that "amusement is rather an unsatisfactory prescription" — it is something like telling people to keep up their spirits — and revises: "you must submit to be mildly bored rather than to go on working." Brooke continues to elaborate: backgammon, shuttlecock, conchology, Smollett — "'Humphry Clinker:' they are a little broad, but she may read anything now she's married, you know." Casaubon bows resignedly and observes that those works had doubtless "served as a resource to a certain order of minds." Brooke advises Lydgate to speak to Mrs. Casaubon directly — she is clever enough for anything. Without that advice, Lydgate had already determined to do so. He meets her glowing from a walk with Celia in the March wind and asks to speak with her alone. She leads him into the darkened library — the first time she has entered it since her husband's collapse. She throws off her bonnet and gloves with an instinctive discarding of formality and begs him: "I beseech you to speak quite plainly. I cannot bear to think that there might be something which I did not know, and which, if I had known it, would have made me act differently." Lydgate tells her: Casaubon may possibly live fifteen years or more, without much worse health than before — if careful against mental agitation of all kinds and against excessive application. On the other hand, the disease may develop more rapidly. "It is one of those cases in which death is sometimes sudden." Dorothea sits as if turned to marble, then asks: "Help me, pray. Tell me what I can do." Lydgate suggests foreign travel. "Oh, that would not do — that would be worse than anything. Nothing will be of any use that he does not enjoy." As he rises to leave she says — in a cry that is almost a prayer — "Oh, you are a wise man, are you not? You know all about life and death. Advise me. Think what I can do. He has been laboring all his life and looking forward. He minds about nothing else. — And I mind about nothing else —" For years after, Lydgate remembered that cry from soul to soul. He could only say he would come again tomorrow. After he leaves, Dorothea notices Will's letters still untouched on the desk. She reads the letter to Casaubon: Will is coming to England, has decided to make his own way, and asks to bring Naumann's painting of the Aquinas (Casaubon's picture) to Lowick. Dorothea gives the letter to her uncle and asks him to write, explaining Casaubon's illness, to discourage the visit. Mr. Brooke is delighted to oblige — his pen is a "thinking organ, evolving sentences...before the rest of his mind could well overtake them." By the end of his three-page letter, the pen has persuaded Brooke not to turn Will away but to invite him to Tipton Grange. Why not? They could go over the Italian drawings together; there was the Pioneer, and the political horizon was expanding. He seals the letter feeling elated. He goes away without telling Dorothea what he has put in it — "in fact, these things were of no importance to her."