The next day I am master of a pretty bay mare, and riding by the side of Fanny Trevanion. Alas! alas!
CHAPTER XXV.
I have not mentioned my Uncle Roland. He is gone—abroad—to fetch his daughter. He has stayed longer than was expected. Does he seek his son still—there as here? My father has finished the first portion of his work, in two great volumes. Uncle Jack, who for some time has been looking melancholy, and who now seldom stirs out, except on Sundays, (on which days we all meet at my father’s and dine together)—Uncle Jack, I say, has undertaken to sell it.
“Don’t be over sanguine,” says Uncle Jack, as he locks up the MS. in two red boxes with a slit in the lids, which belonged to one of the defunct companies. “Don’t be over sanguine as to the price. These publishers never venture much on a first experiment. They must be talked even into looking at the book.”
“Oh!” said my father, “if they will publish it at all, and at their own risk, I should not stand out for any other terms. ‘Nothing great,’ said Dryden, ‘ever came from a venal pen!’”
“An uncommonly foolish observation of Dryden’s,” returned Uncle Jack: “he ought to have known better.”
“So he did,” said I, “for he used his pen to fill his pockets—poor man!”
“But the pen was not venal, master Anachronism,” said my father. “A baker is not to be called venal if he sells his loaves—he is venal if he sells himself: Dryden only sold his loaves.”
“And we must sell yours,” said Uncle Jack emphatically. “A thousand pounds a volume will be about the mark, eh?”
“A thousand pounds a volume?” cried my father. “Gibbon, I fancy, did not receive more.”