I suppose one good resolve
might keep a man right if everybody else's resolve helped him."
The Vicar's talk was not always inspiriting: he had escaped
being a Pharisee, but he had not escaped that low estimate of
possibilities which we rather hastily arrive at as an inference
from our own failure. Lydgate thought that there was a pitiable
infirmity of will in Mr. Farebrother.
CHAPTER XIX.
"L' altra vedete ch'ha fatto alla guancia
Della sua palma, sospirando, letto."
--Purgatorio, vii.
When George the Fourth was still reigning over the privacies of Windsor,
when the Duke of Wellington was Prime Minister, and Mr. Vincy
was mayor of the old corporation in Middlemarch, Mrs. Casaubon,
born Dorothea Brooke, had taken her wedding journey to Rome.
In those days the world in general was more ignorant of good and evil
by forty years than it is at present. Travellers did not often carry
full information on Christian art either in their heads or their pockets;
and even the most brilliant English critic of the day mistook the
flower-flushed tomb of the ascended Virgin for an ornamental vase
due to the painter's fancy. Romanticism, which has helped to fill
some dull blanks with love and knowledge, had not yet penetrated
the times with its leaven and entered into everybody's food; it was
fermenting still as a distinguishable vigorous enthusiasm in certain
long-haired German artists at Rome, and the youth of other nations who
worked or idled near them were sometimes caught in the spreading movement.
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