Mr. Peacock did not feel obliged to accept a new man merely in the character of his successor, objecting that he was “not likely to be equal to Peacock.”

But Lydgate had not been long in the town before there were particulars enough reported of him to breed much more specific expectations and to intensify differences into partisanship; some of the particulars being of that impressive order of which the significance is entirely hidden, like a statistical amount without a standard of comparison, but with a note of exclamation at the end. The cubic feet of oxygen yearly swallowed by a full-grown man⁠—what a shudder they might have created in some Middlemarch circles! “Oxygen! nobody knows what that may be⁠—is it any wonder the cholera has got to Danzig? And yet there are people who say quarantine is no good!”