 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 insistance it might never have begun. But she
had succeeded in making it a matter of course that she should take her place at
an early hour in the library and have work either of reading aloud or copying
assigned her. The work had been easier to define because Mr. Casaubon had
adopted an immediate intention: there was to be a new Parergon, a small
monograph on some lately-traced indications concerning the Egyptian mysteries
whereby certain assertions of Warburton's could be corrected. References were
extensive even here, but not altogether shoreless; and sentences were actually
to be written in the shape wherein they would be scanned by Brasenose and a less
formidable posterity. These minor monumental productions were always exciting to
Mr. Casaubon; digestion was made difficult by the interference of citations, or
by the rivalry of dialectical phrases ringing against each other in his brain.
And from the first there was to be a Latin dedication about which everything was
uncertain except that it was not to be addressed to Carp: it was a poisonous
regret to Mr. Casaubon that he had once addressed a dedication to Carp in which
he had numbered that member of the animal kingdom among the vires nullo oevo
perituros, a mistake which would infallibly lay the dedicator open to ridicule
in the next age, and might even be chuckled over by Pike and Tench in the
present.
    Thus Mr. Casaubon was in one of his busiest epochs, and as I began to say a
little while ago, Dorothea joined him early in the library where he had
breakfasted alone. Celia at this time was on a second visit to Lowick, probably
the last before her marriage, and was in the drawing-room expecting Sir James.
    Dorothea had learned to read the signs of her husband's mood, and she saw
that the morning had become more foggy there during the last hour. She was going
silently to her desk when he
