Middlemarch

For the first time we hear the name of Casaubon's great work: the Key to all Mythologies. Courtship is a hindrance to it, but he has deliberately incurred the hindrance, having decided it is time to "adorn his life with the graces of female companionship" and secure "the solace of female tendance for his declining years." He had expected to feel passion — "to abandon himself to the stream of feeling" — and was surprised to find "what an exceedingly shallow rill it was." Like baptism by immersion in a drought region, sprinkling was the utmost approach to a plunge his stream could afford him. He concludes that the poets have greatly exaggerated the force of masculine passion. He does not question himself; he questions the poets. Dorothea asks whether she might learn to read Latin and Greek aloud to him, as Milton's daughters did. Casaubon gently demurs on the daughters' behalf — they were, apparently, naughty girls who resented the exercise. Dorothea says she hopes he does not expect her to be naughty and stupid. He grants her permission to begin with reading the characters, on the practical grounds that it would save his eyes. But her desire to learn is not purely devotion to him: "Those provinces of masculine knowledge seemed to her a standing-ground from which all truth could be seen more truly." She wanted, poor child, to be wise herself. Mr. Brooke wanders in and pronounces on the lightness of the feminine mind — a touch and go, music and the fine arts — and suggests Casaubon teach Dorothea to take things more quietly. Casaubon defends Dorothea's intellectual appetite by telling Brooke she is only copying Greek characters to save his eyes. Privately, as Brooke shuffles out, he reflects: Casaubon is pretty certain to be a bishop. That was a very seasonable pamphlet of his on the Catholic Question.