One day the Trevanions had all gone into the country on a visit to a retired minister distantly related to Lady Ellinor, and who was one of the few persons Trevanion himself condescended to consult. I had almost a holiday. I went to call on Sir Sedley Beaudesert. I had always longed to sound him on one subject, and had never dared. This time I resolved to pluck up courage.

“Ah, my young friend!” said he, rising from the contemplation of a villanous picture by a young artist, which he had just benevolently purchased, “I was thinking of you this morning.—Wait a moment, Summers [this to the valet]. Be so good as to take this picture; let it be packed up and go down into the country. It is a sort of picture,” he added, turning to me, “that requires a large house. I have an old gallery with little casements that let in no light. It is astonishing how convenient I have found it!” As soon as the picture was gone, Sir Sedley drew a long breath, as if relieved, and resumed more gayly,—

“Yes, I was thinking of you; and if you will forgive any interference in your affairs,—from your father’s old friend,—I should be greatly honored by your permission to ask Trevanion what he supposes is to be the ultimate benefit of the horrible labor he inflicts upon you.”

“But, my dear Sir Sedley, I like the labors; I am perfectly contented.”

“Not to remain always secretary to one who, if there were no business to be done among men, would set about teaching the ants to build hills upon better architectural principles! My dear sir, Trevanion is an awful man, a stupendous man, one catches fatigue if one is in the same room with him three minutes! At your age,—an age that ought to be so happy,”—continued Sir Sedley, with a compassion perfectly angelically “it is sad to see so little enjoyment!”

“But, Sir Sedley, I assure you that you are mistaken, I thoroughly enjoy myself; and have I not heard even you confess that one may be idle and not happy?”

“I did not confess that till I was on the wrong side of forty!” said Sir Sedley, with a slight shade on his brow. “Nobody would ever think you were on the wrong side of forty!” said I, with artful flattery, winding into my subject. “Miss Trevanion, for instance?”

I paused. Sir Sedley looked hard at me, from his bright dark-blue eyes. “Well, Miss Trevanion for instance?”

“Miss Trevanion, who has all the best-looking fellows in London round her, evidently prefers you to any of them.”

I said this with a great gulp. I was obstinately bent on plumbing the depth of my own fears.

Sir Sedley rose; he laid his hand kindly on mine, and said, “Do not let Fanny Trevanion torment you even more than her father does!”

“I don’t understand you, Sir Sedley.”

“But if I understand you, that is more to the purpose. A girl like Miss Trevanion is cruel till she discovers she has a heart. It is not safe to risk one’s own with any woman till she has ceased to be a coquette. My dear young friend, if you took life less in earnest, I should spare you the pain of these hints. Some men sow flowers, some plant trees: you are planting a tree under which you will soon find that no flower will grow. Well and good, if the tree could last to bear fruit and give shade; but beware lest you have to tear it up one day or other; for then—What then? Why, you will find your whole life plucked away with its roots!”

Sir Sedley said these last words with so serious an emphasis that I was startled from the confusion I had felt at the former part of his address. He paused long, tapped his snuff-box, inhaled a pinch slowly, and continued, with his more accustomed sprightliness,—

“Go as much as you can into the world. Again I say, ‘Enjoy yourself.’ And again I ask, what is all this labor to do for you? On some men, far less eminent than Trevanion, it would impose a duty to aid you in a practical career, to secure you a public employment; not so on him. He would not mortgage an inch of his independence by asking a favor from a minister. He so thinks occupation the delight of life that he occupies you out of pure affection. He does not trouble his head about your future. He supposes your father will provide for that, and does not consider that meanwhile your work leads to nothing! Think over all this. I have now bored you enough.”

I was bewildered; I was dumb. These practical men of the world, how they take us by surprise! Here had I come to sound Sir Sedley, and here was I plumbed, gauged, measured, turned inside out, without having got an inch beyond the surface of that smiling, debonnaire, unruffled ease. Yet, with his invariable delicacy, in spite of all this horrible frankness, Sir Sedley had not said a word to wound what he might think the more sensitive part of my amour propre,—not a word as to the inadequacy of my pretensions to think seriously of Fanny Trevanion. Had we been the Celadon and Chloe of a country village, he could not have regarded us as more equal, so far as the world went. And for the rest, he rather insinuated that poor Fanny, the great heiress, was not worthy of me, than that I was not worthy of Fanny.

I felt that there was no wisdom in stammering and blushing out denials and equivocations; so I stretched my hand to Sir Sedley, took up my hat, and went. Instinctively I bent my way to my father’s house. I had not been there for many days. Not only had I had a great deal to do in the way of business, but I am ashamed to say that pleasure itself had so entangled my leisure hours, and Miss Trevanion especially so absorbed them, that, without even uneasy foreboding, I had left my father fluttering his wings more feebly and feebly in the web of Uncle Jack. When I arrived in Russell Street I found the fly and the spider cheek-by-jowl together. Uncle Jack sprang up at my entrance and cried, “Congratulate your father. Congratulate him!—no; congratulate the world!”

“What, uncle!” said I, with a dismal effort at sympathizing liveliness, “is the ‘Literary Times’ launched at last?”

“Oh! that is all settled,—settled long since. Here’s a specimen of the type we have chosen for the leaders.” And Uncle Jack, whose pocket was never without a wet sheet of some kind or other, drew forth a steaming papyral monster, which in point of size was to the political “Times” as a mammoth may be to an elephant. “That is all settled. We are only preparing our contributors, and shall put out our programme next week or the week after. No, Pisistratus, I mean the Great Work.”

“My dear father, I am so glad. What! it is really sold, then?”

“Hum!” said my father.

“Sold!” burst forth Uncle Jack. “Sold,—no, sir, we would not sell it! No; if all the booksellers fell down on their knees to us, as they will some day, that book should not be sold! Sir, that book is a revolution; it is an era; it is the emancipator of genius from mercenary thraldom,—That Book!”

I looked inquiringly from uncle to father, and mentally retracted my congratulations. Then Mr. Caxton, slightly blushing, and shyly rubbing his spectacles, said, “You see, Pisistratus, that though poor Jack has devoted uncommon pains to induce the publishers to recognize the merit he has discovered in the ‘History of Human Error,’ he has failed to do so.”

“Not a bit of it; they all acknowledge its miraculous learning, its—”

“Very true; but they don’t think it will sell, and therefore most selfishly refuse to buy it. One bookseller, indeed, offered to treat for it if I would leave out all about the Hottentots and Caffres, the Greek philosophers and Egyptian priests, and confining myself solely to polite society, entitle the work ‘Anecdotes of the Courts of Europe, Ancient and Modern.’”

“The—wretch!” groaned Uncle Jack.

“Another thought it might be cut up into little essays, leaving out the quotations, entitled ‘Men and Manners.’ A third was kind enough to observe that though this kind of work was quite unsalable, yet, as I appeared to have some historical information, he should be happy to undertake an historical romance from my graphic pen,’—that was the phrase, was it not, Jack?”

Jack was too full to speak.

“Provided I would introduce a proper love-plot, and make it into three volumes post octavo, twenty-three lines in a page, neither more nor less. One honest fellow at last was found who seemed to me a very respectable and indeed enterprising person. And after going through a list of calculations, which showed that no possible profit could arise, he generously offered to give me half of those no-profits, provided I would guarantee half the very visible expenses. I was just meditating the prudence of accepting this proposal, when your uncle was seized with a sublime idea, which has whisked up my book in a whirlwind of expectation.”

“And that idea?” said I, despondently.

“That idea,” quoth Uncle Jack, recovering himself, “is simply and shortly this. From time immemorial, authors have been the prey of the publishers. Sir, authors have lived in garrets, nay, have been choked in the street by an unexpected crumb of bread, like the man who wrote the play, poor fellow!”

“Otway,” said my father. “The story is not true,—no matter.”

“Milton, sir, as everybody knows, sold ‘Paradise Lost’ for ten pounds,—ten pounds, Sir! In short, instances of a like nature are too numerous to quote.—But the booksellers, sir, they are leviathans; they roll in seas of gold; they subsist upon authors as vampires upon little children. But at last endurance has reached its limit; the fiat has gone forth; the tocsin of liberty has resounded: authors have burst their fetters. And we have just inaugurated the institution of ‘The Grand Anti-Publisher Confederate Authors’ Society,’ by which, Pisistratus, by which, mark you, every author is to be his own publisher; that is, every author who joins the society. No more submission of immortal works to mercenary calculators, to sordid tastes; no more hard bargains and broken hearts; no more crumbs of bread choking great tragic poets in the streets; no more Paradises Lost sold at L10 a-piece! The author brings his book to a select committee appointed for the purpose,—men of delicacy, education, and refinement, authors themselves; they read it, the society publish; and after a modest deduction, which goes towards the funds of the society, the treasurer hands over the profits to the author.”

“So that, in fact, uncle, every author who can’t find a publisher anywhere else will of course come to the society. The fraternity will be numerous.”

“It will indeed.”

“And the speculation—ruinous.”

“Ruinous, why?”

“Because in all mercantile negotiations it is ruinous to invest capital in supplies which fail of demand. You undertake to publish books that booksellers will not publish: why? Because booksellers can’t sell them. It’s just probable that you’ll not sell them any better than the booksellers. Ergo, the more your business, the larger your deficit; and the more numerous your society, the more disastrous your condition. Q. E. D.”

“Pooh! The select committee will decide what books are to be published.”

“Then where the deuce is the advantage to the authors? I would as lief submit; my work to a publisher as I would to a select committee of authors. At all events, the publisher is not my rival; and I suspect he is the best judge, after all, of a book,—as an accoucheur ought to be of a baby.”

“Upon my word, nephew, you pay a bad compliment to your father’s Great Work, which the booksellers will have nothing to do with.”

That was artfully said, and I was posed; when Mr. Caxton observed, with an apologetic smile,—

“The fact is, my dear Pisistratus, that I want my book published without diminishing the little fortune I keep for you some day. Uncle Jack starts a society so to publish it. Health and long life to Uncle Jack’s society! One can’t look a gift horse in the mouth.”

Here my mother entered, rosy from a shopping expedition with Mrs. Primmins; and in her joy at hearing that I could stay to dinner, all else was forgotten. By a wonder, which I did not regret, Uncle Jack really was engaged to dine out. He had other irons in the fire besides the “Literary Times” and the “Confederate Authors’ Society;” he was deep in a scheme for making house-tops of felt (which, under other hands, has, I believe, since succeeded); and he had found a rich man (I suppose a hatter) who seemed well inclined to the project, and had actually asked him to dine and expound his views.