MIDDLEMARCH (Completed)

Chapter 41

"By swaggering could I never thrive,

For the rain it raineth every day.

--Twelfth Night

The transactions referred to by Caleb Garth as having gone forward

between Mr. Bulstrode and Mr. Joshua Rigg Featherstone concerning

the land attached to Stone Court, had occasioned the interchange

of a letter or two between these personages.

Who shall tell what may be the effect of writing? If it happens

to have been cut in stone, though it lie face down-most for ages

on a forsaken beach, or "rest quietly under the drums and tramplings

of many conquests," it may end by letting us into the secret of

usurpations and other scandals gossiped about long empires ago:--

this world being apparently a huge whispering-gallery. Such conditions

are often minutely represented in our petty lifetimes. As the stone

which has been kicked by generations of clowns may come by curious

little links of effect under the eyes of a scholar, through whose

labors it may at last fix the date of invasions and unlock religions,

so a bit of ink and paper which has long been an innocent wrapping

or stop-gap may at last be laid open under the one pair of eyes which

have knowledge enough to turn it into the opening of a catastrophe.

To Uriel watching the progress of planetary history from the sun,

the one result would be just as much of a coincidence as the other.

Having made this rather lofty comparison I am less uneasy in calling

attention to the existence of low people by whose interference,

however little we may like it, the course of the world is very

much determined. It would be well, certainly, if we could help

to reduce their number, and something might perhaps be done by not

lightly giving occasion to their existence. Socially speaking,

Joshua Rigg would have been generally pronounced a superfluity.

But those who like Peter Featherstone never had a copy of

themselves demanded, are the very last to wait for such a request

either in prose or verse. The copy in this case bore more of

outside resemblance to the mother, in whose sex frog-features,

accompanied with fresh-colored cheeks and a well-rounded figure,

are compatible with much charm for a certain order of admirers.

The result is sometimes a frog-faced male, desirable, surely,

to no order of intelligent beings. Especially when he is suddenly

brought into evidence to frustrate other people's expectations--

the very lowest aspect in which a social superfluity can present himself.