The real Dr. Fitzpiers w as a man of too
many hobbies to show likelihood of rising to any great eminence in
the profession he had chosen, or even to acquire any wide practice
in the rural district he had marked out as his field of survey for
the present. In the course of a year his mind was accustomed to
pass in a grand solar sweep through all the zodiacal signs of the
intellectual heaven. Sometimes it was in the Ram, sometimes in
the Bull; one month he would be immersed in alchemy, another in
poesy; one month in the Twins of astrology and astronomy; then in
the Crab of German literature and metaphysics. In justice to him
it must be stated that he took such studies as were immediately
related to his own profession in turn with the rest, and it had
been in a month of anatomical ardor without the possibility of a
subject that he had proposed to Grammer Oliver the terms she had
mentioned to her mistress.
As may be inferred from the tone of his conversation with
Winterborne, he had lately plunged into abstract philosophy with
much zest; perhaps his keenly appreciative, modern, unpractical
mind found this a realm more to his taste than any other.
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