This is brilliant-
Page 720 Raffles has died under Boulstrode’s care; Lydgate, being the attending doctor. His prescription for the dying man was to administer a strict quantity of opium with no alcohol, even if strongly pressed. Boulstrode, not unaversed to the idea of a speedy demise of Raffles, decides not to tell his housekeeper about the limits placed on the use of opium. He also allowed his her to acquiesce to the demands of his alcoholic unwanted guest. He gives her access to his spirits cabinet.
The burgers of Middlemarch smell a rat. They are not keen on Boulstode, and Mr Hawley, a lawyer, does some investigating.
“For hardly anyone doubted that some scandalous reason or other was at the bottom of Boulstrode’s liberality to Lydgate (he had just paid off his debts with a large loan of money). Mr Hawley, indeed, in the first instance, invited a select party, including the two physicians, with Mr Toller and Mr Wrench, expressly to hold a close discussion as to the probabilities of Raffle’s illness, reciting to them all the particulars which had been gathered from Mrs Able in connection with Lydgate’s certificate, that the death was due to delirium tremans, and the medical gentlemen, who all stood undisturbedly on the old path in relation to this disease, declared that they could see nothing in these particulars which could be transformed into a positive ground of suspicion.”
In other words, their medical practice was so out of date that they could not see the crime before their eyes.
The sad epitaph given to Lydgate goes as follows- page 737
“Only those who know the supremacy of the intellectual life - the life which has a seal of ennobling thought and purpose within it- can understand the grief of one who falls from serene activity into the absorbing soul washing struggle with worldly annoyances.”
Casauban's interest in Xisuthrus, Sumerian 'Noah', is mocked. What about Atrshasis from Gilgamesh, or Utnapishtim from Babylonia?
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