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CHAPTER XLII . How much , methinks , I could despise this man Were I not bound in charity against it ! — SHAKESPEARE : Henry VIII . One of the professional calls made by Lydgate soon after his return from his wedding - journey was to Lowick Manor , in consequence of a letter which had requested him to fix a time for his visit . Mr . Casaubon had never put any question concerning the nature of his illness to Lydgate , nor had he even to Dorothea betrayed any anxiety as to how far it might be likely to cut short his labors or his life . On this point , as on all others , he shrank from pity ; and if the suspicion of being pitied for anything in his lot surmised or known in spite of himself was embittering , the idea of calling forth a show of compassion by frankly admitting an alarm or a sorrow was necessarily intolerable to him . Every proud mind knows something of this experience , and perhaps it is only to be overcome by a sense of fellowship deep enough to make all efforts at isolation seem mean and petty instead of exalting . But Mr . Casaubon was now brooding over something through which the question of his health and life haunted his silence with a more harassing importunity even than through the autumnal unripeness of his authorship . It is true that this last might be called his central ambition ; but there are some kinds of authorship in which by far the largest result is the uneasy susceptibility accumulated in the consciousness of the author — one knows of the river by a few streaks amid a long - gathered deposit of uncomfortable mud . That was the way with Mr . Casaubon’s hard intellectual labors . Their most characteristic result was not the “ Key to all Mythologies , ” but a morbid consciousness that others did not give him the place which he had not demonstrably merited — a perpetual suspicious conjecture that the views entertained of him were not to his advantage — a melancholy absence of passion in his efforts at achievement , and a passionate resistance to the confession that he had achieved nothing . Thus his intellectual ambition which seemed to others to have absorbed and dried him , was really no security against wounds , least of all against those which came from Dorothea . And he had begun now to frame possibilities for the future which were somehow more embittering to him than anything his mind had dwelt on before .
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