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 wittil