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.