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