BOOK EIGHTH.
CHAPTER I.
"A little fire burns up a great deal of corn."
Old Proverb.
Guy Darrell resumed the thread of solitary life at Fawley with a calm that was deeper in its gloom than it had been before. The experiment of return to the social world had failed. The resolutions which had induced the experiment were finally renounced. Five years nearer to death, and the last hope that had flitted across the narrow desponding passage to the grave, fallen like a faithless torch from his own hand, and trodden out by his own foot.
It was peculiarly in the nature of Darrell to connect his objects with posterity—to regard eminence in the Present but as a beacon-height from which to pass on to the Future the name he had taken from the Past. All his early ambition, sacrificing pleasure to toil, had placed its goal at a distance, remote from the huzzas of by-standers; and Ambition halted now, baffled and despairing. Childless, his line would perish with himself—himself, who had so vaunted its restoration in the land! His genius was childless also. It would leave behind it no offspring of the brain. By toil he had amassed ample wealth; by talent he had achieved a splendid reputation. But the reputation was as perishable as the wealth.
Let a half century pass over his tomb, and nothing would be left to speak of the successful lawyer, the applauded orator, save traditional anecdotes, a laudatory notice in contemporaneous memoirs—perhaps, at most, quotations of elegant sentences lavished on forgotten cases and obsolete debates—shreds and fra: ments of a great intellect, which another half-century would sink without a bubble into the depths of Time.[1] He had enacted no
- ↑ It is so with many a Poliio of the Bar and Senate. Fifty years hence and how faint upon the page of Hansard will be the vestiges of Follett! No
