The Hegira is completed,--we have all taken roost in the old Tower. My
father's books have arrived by the wagon, and have settled themselves
quietly in their new abode,--filling up the apartment dedicated to their
owner, including the bed chamber and two lobbies. The duck also has
arrived, under wing of Mrs. Primmins, and has reconciled herself to the
old stewpond, by the side of which my father has found a walk that
compensates for the peach-wall, especially as he has made acquaintance
with sundry respectable carps, who permit him to feed them after he has
fed the duck,--a privilege of which (since, if any one else approaches,
the carps are off in an instant) my father is naturally vain. All
privileges are valuable in proportion to the exclusiveness of their
enjoyment.
Now, from the moment the first carp had eaten the bread my father threw
to it, Mr. Caxton had mentally resolved that a race so confiding should
never be sacrificed to Ceres and Primmins. But all the fishes on my
uncle's property were under the special care of that Proteus Bolt; and
Bolt was not a man likely to suffer the carps to earn their bread
without contributing their full share to the wants of the community.
But, like master, like man! Bolt was an aristocrat fit to be hung a la
lanterne. He out-Rolanded Roland in the respect he entertained for
sounding names and old families; and by that bait my father caught him
with such skill that you might see that if Austin Caxton had been an
angler of fishes, he could have filled his basket full any day, shine or
rain.
"You observe, Bolt," said my father, beginning artfully, "that those
fishes, dull as you may think them; are creatures capable of a
syllogism; and if they saw that, in proportion to their civility to me,
they were depopulated by you, they would put two and two together, and
renounce my acquaintance."
"Is that what you call being silly Jems, sir?" said Bolt. "Faith! there
is many a good Christian not half so wise."
"Man," answered my father, thoughtfully, "is an animal less
syllogistical or more silly-Jemical, than many creatures popularly
esteemed his inferiors. Yes, let but one of those Cyprinidae, with his
fine sense of logic, see that if his fellow-fishes eat bread, they, are
suddenly jerked out of their element and vanish forever, and though you
broke a quartern loaf into crumbs, he would snap his tail at you with
enlightened contempt. If," said my father, soliloquizing, "I had been
as syllogistic as those scaly logicians, I should never have swallowed
that hook which--Hum! there--least said soonest mended. But, Mr. Bolt,
to return to the Cyprinidae."
"What's the hard name you call them 'ere carp, yer honor?" asked Bolt.
"Cyprinidae,--a family of the section Malacoptergii Abdominales,"
replied Mr. Caxton; "their teeth are generally confined to the
Pharyngeans, and their branehiostegous rays are but few,--marks of
distinction from fishes vulgar and voracious."
"Sir," said Bolt, glancing to the stewpond, "if I had known they had
been a family of such importance, I am sure I should have treated them
with more respect."
"They are a very old family, Bolt, and have been settled in England
since the fourteenth century. A younger branch of the family has
established itself in a pond in the gardens of Peterhoff (the celebrated
palace of Peter the Great, Bolt,--an emperor highly respected by my
brother, for he killed a great many people very gloriously in battle,
besides those whom he sabred for his own private amusement); and there
is an officer or servant of the Imperial household, whose task it is to
summon those Russian Cyprinidae to dinner, by ringing a bell, shortly
after which, you may see the emperor and empress, with all their waiting
ladies and gentlemen, coming down in their carriages to see the
Cyprinidae eat in state. So you perceive, Bolt, that it would be a
republican, Jacobinical proceeding to stew members of a family so
intimately associated with royalty."
"Dear me, sir," said Bolt, "I am very glad you told me. I ought to have
known they were genteel fish, they are so mighty shy,--as all your real
quality are."
My father smiled, and rubbed his hands gently,--he had carried his
point; and henceforth the Cyprinidae of the section Malacoptergii
Abdominales were as sacred in Bolt's eyes as cats and ichneumons were in
those of a priest in Thebes.
My poor father, with what true and unostentatious philosophy thou didst
accommodate thyself to the greatest change thy quiet, harmless life had
known since it had passed out of the brief, burning cycle of the
passions! Lost was the home endeared to thee by so many noiseless
victories of the mind, so many mute histories of the heart; for only the
scholar knoweth how deep a charm lies in monotony, in the old
associations, the old ways and habitual clockwork of peaceful time. Yet
the home may be replaced,--thy heart built its home round itself
everywhere,--and the old Tower might supply the loss of the brick house,
and the walk by the stewpond become as dear as the haunts by the sunny
peach-wall. But what shall replace to thee the bright dream of thine
innocent ambition,--that angel-wing which had glittered across thy
manhood, in the hour between its noon and its setting What replace to
thee the Magnum Opus--the Great Book!--fair and broad-spreading tree,
lone amidst the sameness of the landscape, now plucked up by the roots?
The oxygen was subtracted from the air of thy life. For be it known to
you, O my compassionate readers, that with the death of the Anti-
Publisher Society the blood-streams of the Great Book stood still, its
pulse was arrested, its full heart beat no more. Three thousand copies
of the first seven sheets in quarto, with sundry unfinished plates,
anatomical, architectural, and graphic, depicting various developments
of the human skull (that temple of Human Error), from the Hottentot to
the Greek; sketches of ancient buildings, Cyclopean and Pelasgic;
Pyramids and Pur-tors, all signs of races whose handwriting was on their
walls; landscapes to display the influence of Nature upon the customs,
creeds, and philosophy of men,--here showing how the broad Chaldean
wastes led to the contemplation of the stars; and illustrations of the
Zodiac, in elucidation of the mysteries of symbol-worship; fantastic
vagaries of earth fresh from the Deluge, tending to impress on early
superstition the awful sense of the rude powers of Nature; views of the
rocky defiles of Laconia,--Sparta, neighbored by the "silent Amyclae,"
explaining, as it were, geographically the iron customs of the warrior
colony (arch-Tories, amidst the shift and roar of Hellenic democracies),
contrasted by the seas and coasts and creeks of Athens and Ionia,
tempting to adventure, commerce, and change. Yea, my father, in his
suggestions to the artist of those few imperfect plates, had thrown as
much light on the infancy of earth and its tribes as by the "shining
words" that flowed from his calm, starry knowledge! Plates and copies,
all rested now in peace and dust, "housed with darkness and with death,"
on the sepulchral shelves of the lobby to which they were consigned,--
rays intercepted, world incompleted. The Prometheus was bound, and the
fire he had stolen from heaven lay imbedded in the flints of his rock.
For so costly was the mould in which Uncle Jack and the Anti-Publisher
Society had contrived to cast this exposition of Human Error that every
bookseller shied at its very sight, as an owl blinks at daylight, or
human error at truth. In vain Squills and I, before we left London, had
carried a gigantic specimen of the Magnum Opus into the back parlors of
firms the most opulent and adventurous. Publisher after publisher
started, as if we had held a blunderbuss to his ear. All Paternoster
Row uttered a "Lord deliver us!" Human Error found no man so
egregiously its victim as to complete those two quartos, with the
prospect of two others, at his own expense. Now, I had earnestly hoped
that my father, for the sake of mankind, would be persuaded to risk some
portion--and that, I own, not a small one--of his remaining capital on
the conclusion of an undertaking so elaborately begun. But there my
father was obdurate. No big words about mankind, and the advantage to
unborn generations, could stir him an inch. "Stuff!" said Mr. Caxton,
peevishly. "A man's duties to mankind and posterity begin with his own
son; and having wasted half your patrimony, I will not take another huge
slice out of the poor remainder to gratify my vanity, for that is the
plain truth of it. Man must atone for sin by expiation. By the book I
have sinned, and the book must expiate it. Pile the sheets up in the
lobby, so that at least one man may be wiser and humbler by the sight of
Human Error every time he walks by so stupendous a monument of it."
Verily, I know not how my father could bear to look at those dumb
fragments of himself,--strata of the Caxtonian conformation lying layer
upon layer, as if packed up and disposed for the inquisitive genius of
some moral Murchison or Mantell. But for my part, I never glanced at
their repose in the dark lobby without thinking, "Courage, Pisistratus!
courage! There's something worth living for; work hard, grow rich, and
the Great Book shall come out at last!"
Meanwhile, I wandered over the country and made acquaintance with the
farmers and with Trevanion's steward,--an able man and a great
agriculturist,--and I learned from them a better notion of the nature of
my uncle's domains. Those domains covered an immense acreage, which,
save a small farm, was of no value at present. But land of the same
sort had been lately redeemed by a simple kind of draining, now well
known in Cumberland; and, with capital, Roland's barren moors might
become a noble property. But capital, where was that to come from?
Nature gives us all, except the means to turn her into marketable
account. As old Plautus saith so wittily, "Day, night, water, sun, and
moon, are to be had gratis; for everything else--down with your dust!"