He owed something of this sadness, perhaps, to a cause which many would hold of small significance.  Though he had mourned for no lost love, at least so far as was known, though he had never suffered the pang of parting with a child, though he seemed isolated from those joys and griefs which come with the ties of family, he too had his private urn filled with the ashes of extinguished hopes.  He was the father of a dead book.

Why “Thoughts on the Universe, by Byles Gridley, A. M.,” had not met with an eager welcome and a permanent demand from the discriminating public, it would take us too long to inquire in detail.  Indeed; he himself was never able to account satisfactorily for the state of things which his bookseller’s account made evident to him.  He had read and re-read his work; and the more familiar he became with it, the less was he able to understand the singular want of popular appreciation of what he could not help recognizing as its excellences.  He had a special copy of his work, printed on large paper and sumptuously bound.  He loved to read in this, as people read over the letters of friends who have long been dead; and it might have awakened a feeling of something far removed from the ludicrous, if his comments on his own production could have been heard.  “That’s a thought, now, for you!—­See Mr. Thomas Babington Macaulay’s Essay printed six years after thus book.”  “A felicitous image! and so everybody would have said if only Mr. Thomas Carlyle had hit upon it.”  “If this is not genuine pathos, where will you find it, I should like to know?  And nobody to open the book where it stands written but one poor old man—­in this generation, at least—­in this generation!” It may be doubted whether he would ever have loved his book with such jealous fondness if it had gone through a dozen editions, and everybody was quoting it to his face.  But now it lived only for him; and to him it was wife and child, parent, friend, all in one, as Hector was all in all to his spouse.  He never tired of it, and in his more sanguine moods he looked forward to the time when the world would acknowledge its merits, and his genius would find full recognition.  Perhaps he was right:  more than one book which seemed dead and was dead for contemporary readers has had a resurrection when the rivals who triumphed over it lived only in the tombstone memory of antiquaries.  Comfort for some of us, dear fellow-writer.

It followed from the way in which he lived that he must have some means of support upon which he could depend.  He was economical, if not over frugal in some of his habits; but he bought books, and took newspapers and reviews, and had money when money was needed; the fact being, though it was not generally known, that a distant relative had not long before died, leaving him a very comfortable property.

His money matters had led him to have occasional dealings with the late legal firm of Wibird and Penhallow, which had naturally passed into the hands of the new partnership, Penhallow and Bradshaw.  He had entire confidence in the senior partner, but not so much in the young man who had been recently associated in the business.