A Surveyor of the Revenue

There would have been something sad, unutterably dreary in all this. A gift, a faculty, if it had not depart ed, was suspended and inanimate within me. My fellow officers and the merchants and sea captains with whom my officialdu s brought me into any manner of connection probably knew me in no other character. None of them, i presume, had ever read a page of my inediting, or would have cared a fig the more for me if they had done so. It is a good lesson, though it may often be a hard one for a man who has dreamed of literary fame and of making for himself a rank among the world's dignit