He suspected the Archdeacon of not having read them; he was in painful
doubt as to what was really thought of them by the leading minds of
Brasenose, and bitterly convinced that his old acquaintance Carp had
been the writer of that depreciatory recension which was kept locked in
a small drawer of Mr. Casaubon's desk, and also in a dark closet of his
verbal memory. These were heavy impressions to struggle against, and
brought that melancholy embitterment which is the consequence of all
excessive claim: even his religious faith wavered with his wavering
trust in his own authorship, and the consolations of the Christian hope
in immortality seemed to lean on the immortality of the still unwritten
Key to all Mythologies. For my part I am very sorry for him. It is an
uneasy lot at best, to be what we call highly taught and yet not to
enjoy: to be present at this great spectacle of life and never to be
liberated from a small hungry shivering self--never to be fully
possessed by the glory we behold, never to have our consciousness
rapturously transformed into the vividness of a thought, the ardor of a
passion, the energy of an action, but always to be scholarly and
uninspired, ambitious and timid, scrupulous and dim-sighted. Becoming a
dean or even a bishop would make little difference, I fear, to Mr.
Casaubon's uneasiness. Doubtless some ancient Greek has observed that
behind the big mask and the speaking-trumpet, there must always be our
poor little eyes peeping as usual and our timorous lips more or less
under anxious control.

To this mental estate mapped out a quarter of a century before, to
sensibilities thus fenced in, Mr. Casaubon had thought of annexing
happiness with a lovely young bride; but even before marriage, as we
have seen, he found himself under a new depression in the consciousness
that the new bliss was not blissful to him. Inclination yearned back
to its old, easier custom. And the deeper he went in domesticity the
more did the sense of acquitting himself and acting with propriety
predominate over any other satisfaction. Marriage, like religion and
erudition, nay, like authorship itself, was fated to become an outward
requirement, and Edward Casaubon was bent on fulfilling unimpeachably
all requirements. Even drawing Dorothea into use in his study,
according to his own intention before marriage, was an effort which he
was always tempted to defer, and but for her pleading insistence it
might never