The favorable judgment of this second friend was
patiently listened to by the publisher, and his promise given that the
manuscript should receive all proper attention.
On this part of my story there is no occasion to linger; for, strange
thing to tell,--strange, I mean, from the unlikelihood of its
happening,--the poem found the sympathetic spot in the heart of the
publisher, who had happily not delegated the task to his reader, but
read it himself; and he made Hector the liberal offer to undertake all
the necessary expenses, giving him a fair share of resulting profits.
Stranger yet, the poem was so far a success that the whole edition, not
a large one, was sold, with a result in money necessarily small but far
from unsatisfactory to Hector. At the publisher's suggestion, this first
volume was soon followed by another; and thus was Hector fairly launched
on the uncertain sea of a literary life; happy in this, that he was not
entirely dependent on literature for his bodily sustenance, but was in a
position otherwise to earn at least his bread and cheese. For some time
longer he continued to have no experience of the killing necessity of
writing for his daily bread, beneath which so many aspiring spirits sink
prematurely exhausted and withered; this was happily postponed, for
there are as much Providence and mercy in the orderly arrangement of our
trials as in their inevitable arrival.
His reception by what is called the public was by no means so remarkable
or triumphant as to give his well-wishers any ground for anxiety as to
its possible moral effect upon him; but it was a great joy to him that
his father was much interested and delighted in the reception of the
poem by the Reviews in general.
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