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.
Though Mr Farebrother occupies a somewhat less prominent place in the
narrative, he is delineated with not less consummate skill. He comes
before us at first a man of genial kindly sympathies, frankly alive to,
and frankly acknowledging, his own deficiencies.
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