The motto at the head of chapter 42 of Middlemarch is one of those surprises that turn out to be more and more interesting the more you think about them:

As it happens, the speaker in Shakespeare's play is Cardinal Wolsey, and this elegant piece of popish casuistry is aimed at Surrey who is busily trying to relieve him of the great seal of England. But when these lines become the motto of chapter 42, ‘this man’ becomes the Reverend Edward Casaubon, and the whole effect is of an anarchic joke – against George Eliot herself. The moral constraints that apply in the novel itself are being wryly mocked, for George Eliot is firmly committed to doing something much ‘higher’ than despising. The mockery releases the liberating possibility of actually loathing ‘this man’ frankly and to the full – a possibility that corresponds to a gathering need audible in the narrating voice, not to be ‘bound’ in feeling by anything at all. By the middle of the novel, reminders that ‘poor Mr Casaubon’ had a point of view too sound increasingly forced, and scarcely check the vexed undertones of narrative complaint against him. Such feelings, which have no place in the novel's final moral vocabulary, tend in the end to empty that vocabulary of its force. Being bound to it, as George Eliot is, ultimately dries up charity altogether.