The whole character and career of Lydgate are brought before us with the skill of the consummate artist. At first he appears as a man of massive and energetic proportions, of high professional impulses and aims, resolute to carry these through against all difficulty and amid all indifference and opposition, and apparently seeking through these aims the general good of humanity--the alleviation of suffering, and the arrestment, it may be, of death. But even then there are signs of inherent weakness, and all but certain decline and fall. There are indications of arrogant self sufficiency and supercilious contempt for others; of undue deference for Bulstrode, not from respect or esteem, but as a tool to further his views; and a tendency to treat patients not as human beings but as cases--objects to experiment on, and verify hypotheses regarding pathology and disease, all which betray a nature not attuned to the highest and noblest pitch, and that cannot be expected to stand in the hour of trial. His first direct lapse is when, against his secret conviction, he supports Tyke as hospital chaplain in opposition to Farebrother; but mainly in mere defiance and resentment of the general style of his reception at the Board meeting, and the opposition he encounters there. Anon comes his marriage to Rosamond Vincy,--a marriage prompted by no true affection, but solely by the fascination of her prettiness, her external grace and accomplishments. Led on mainly by his own taste for luxury and external show, he plunges into extravagances of every kind. Debt inevitably follows, crippling his resources, cramping his energies, fettering him as regards all his higher professional aims and efforts. To his wife he looks in vain for sympathy or aid. She only aggravates the difficulties and harassments of his life by her callous selfishness, her dull obdurate insistance on all her own claims, her mean deceits and concealments. Embarrassments of every kind thicken around him; and at last in the all but universal estimation of his fellows, and nearly in his own, in the hope of temporary relief he becomes accessory to murder. His end is as sad a one for his character, and in his circumstances, as can well be conceived: falling from all his high if somewhat arrogant professional aims, his hopes of elevating the general practitioner, and of raising medicine from an art to a science, into the fashionable London lady's doctor.