studied metaphysics, I should have objected to middle age, sit down and look back upon to that title, inasmuch as the antithesis is im- his college days, and his college friends; and perfect between the two things named in it. think sadly of the failures, the disappointDisappointment and Success are not prop-ments, the broken hearts, which have been erly antithetic; Failure and Success are. Disappointment is the feeling caused by failure, and caused also by other things besides failure. Failure is the thing; disappointment is the feeling caused by the thing; while success is the thing, and not the feeling. But such minute points apart, the title I have chosen brings out best the subject about which I wish to write. And a very wide subject it is; and one of universal interest. among those who all started fair and promised well? How very much has after life changed the estimates which we formed in those days, of the intellectual mark and probable fate of one's friends and acquaintances! You remember the dense, stolid dunces of that time: you remember the men who sat next you in the lecture-room, and never answered rightly a question that was put to them: you remember how you used to wonder if they would alI suppose that no one will dispute the fact ways be the dunces they were then. Well, I that in this world there are such things as never knew a man who was a dunce at twenty, disappointment and success. I do not mean to prove what might be called a brilliant or mere.y that each man's lot has its share of even a clever man in after life; but we have ooth; I mean that there are some men whose all known such do wonderfully decently. You life on the whole is a failure, and that there did not expect much of them, you see. You are others whose life on the whole is a success. did not try them by an exacting standard. You and I, my reader, know better than to If a monkey were to write his name, you think that life is a lottery; but those who would be so much surprised at seeing him do think it a lottery, must see that there are huit at all, that you would never think of being man beings who draw the prizes, and others surprised that he did not do it very well. So who draw the blanks. I believe in luck, and ill luck, as facts; of course, I do not believe the theory upon which common consent builds tnese facts. There is, of course, no such thing as chance; this world is driven with far too tight a rein to permit of any thing whatsoever falling out in a way properly fortuitous. But it cannot be denied that there are persons with whom every thing goes well, and other persons with whom every thing goes ill. There are people who invariably win at what are called games of chance. There are people who invariably lose. You remember when Sydney Smith lay on his death-bed, how he suddenly startled the watchers by it, by breaking a long silence with a sentence from one of his sermons, repeated in a deep, solemn voice, strange from the dying man. His life had been successful at last; but success had come late; and how much of disappointment he had known! And though he had tried to bear up cheerily under his early cares, they had sunk in deep. "We speak of life as a journey," he said, "but how differently is that journey performed! Some are borne along their path in luxury and ease; while some must walk it with naked feet, mangled and bleeding." Who is there that does not sometimes, on a quiet evening, even before he has attained if a man you knew as a remarkably stupid fellow preaches a decent sermon, you hardly think of remarking that it is very commonplace and dull, you are so much pleased ana surprised to find that the man can preach at all. And then, the dunces of college days are often sensible, though slow; and in this world, plain, plodding common sense is very likely in the long run to beat erratic brilliancy. The tortoise passes the hare. I owe an apology to Lord Campbell for even naming him in connection with the name of dunce: for assuredly in shrewd, massive sense, no judge ever surpassed him. But I may fairly point to his career of unexampled success as an instance which proves my principle. See how that man of parts which are sound and solid, but not brilliant or showy, has won the Derby and the St. Leger of the law; has filled with high credit the places of chief justice of England and lord-chancellor. And contrast his eminently successful and useful course with that of the fitful meteor, Lord Brougham. What a great, dazzling genius Brougham unquestionably is; yet his greatest admirer must admit that his life has been a brilliant failure. But while you, thoughtful reader, in such a retrospect as I have been supposing, sometimes wonder at the decent and reasonable success of the dunce, do you Think of a mind in which disappointment is a thing unknown! I think that one would be oppressed by a vague sense of fear in regarding one's self as treated by Providence in a fashion so different from the vast majority of the race. It cannot be denied that there are men in this world in whose lot failure seems to be the rule. Every thing to which they put their hand breaks down or goes amiss. But most human beings can testify that their lot, like their abilities, their stature is a sort of middling thing. There is about not often lament over the fashion in which | had known what it was to fail. What a curithose who promised well, and even brilliantly, ous state of feeling it would be to most men have disappointed the hopes entertained of to know themselves able to assert so much! them? What miserable failures such have not unfrequently made! And not always through bad conduct either: not always, though sometimes, by taking to vicious courses; but rather by a certain want of tact and sense, or even by just somehow missing the favorable tide. You have got a fair living and a fair standing in the church; you have held them for eight or ten years; when some evening as you are sitting in your study or playing with your children, a servant tells you, doubtfully, that a man is waiting to see you. A poor, thin, shabbily dressed fellow comes in, and in fal- it an equable sobriety, a sort of average entering tones begs for the loan of five shillings.durableness. Some things go well: some Ah, with what a start you recognize him! It is the clever fellow whom you hardly beat at college, who was always so lively and merry, who sang so nicely, and was so much asked out into society. You had lost sight of him | for several years; and now here he is, shabby, dirty, smelling of whiskey, with bloated face and trembling hand: alas, alas, ruined! Oh, do not give him up! Perhaps you can do something for him. Little kindness he has known for very long. Give him the five shillings by all means; but next morning see you go out, and try what may be done to lift him out of the slough of despond, and to give him a chance for better days! I know that it may be all in vain; and that after years gradually darkening down you may some day, as you pass the police office, find a crowd at the door, and learn that they have got the corpse of the poor suicide within. And even when the failure is not so utter as this, you find, now and then, as life goes onward, that this and that old acquaintance has, you cannot say how, stepped out of the track, and is stranded. He went into the church: he is no worse preacher or scholar than many that succeed; but somehow he never gets a living. You sometimes meet him in the street, threadbare and soured: he probably passes you without recognizing you. O reader, to whom God has sent moderate success, always be chivalrously kind and considerate to such disappointed man! a I have heard of an eminent man who, when well advanced in years, was able to say that through all his life he had never set his mind on any thing which he did not succeed in attaining. Great and little aims alike, he never things go ill. There is a modicum of disappointment: there is a modicum of success. But so much of disappointment comes to the lot of almost all, that there is no object in nature at which we all look with so much interest as the invariably lucky man-the man whom all this system of things appears to favor. You knew such a one at school: you knew him at college: you knew him at the bar, in the church, in medicine, in politics, in society. Somehow he pushes his way: things turn up just at the right time for him: great peop.e take a fancy to him: the newspapers cry him up. Let us hope that you do not look at him with any feelings of envy or bitterness; but you cannot help looking at him with great interest, he is so like yourself, and, at the same time, so very unlike you. Philosophers tell us that real happiness is very equally distributed; but there is no doubt that there is a tremendous external difference between the man who lives in a grand house, with every appliance of elegance and luxury, with plump servants, fine horses, many carriages, and the poor struggling gentleman, perhaps a married curate, whose dwelling is bare, whose dress is poor, whose fare is scanty, whose wife is care worn, whose children are ill-fed, shabbily dressed, and scantily educated. It is conceivable that fanciful wants, slights, and failures, may cause the rich man as much and as real suffering as substantial wants and failures cause the poor; but the world at large will recognize the rich man's lot as one of success, and the poor man's as one of failure. This is a world of competition. It is a world full of things that many people wish to get, and that all cannot get at once; and to say this is much as to say that this is a world of failures and disappointments. All things desirable. by their very existence imply the disappointment of some. When you, my reader, being no longer young, look with a philosophic eye at some pretty girl entering a drawing-room, you cannot but reflect, as you survey the pleasing picture, and more especially when you think of the twenty thousand pounds-Ah! my gentle young friend, you will some day make one heart very jolly, but a great many more extremely envious, wrathful, and disappointed. So with an other desirable things; so with a large living in the church; so with any place of dignity; so with a seat on the bench; so with a bishopric; so with the woolsack; so with the towers of Lambeth. So with smaller matters; so with a good business in the greengrocery line; so with a well-paying milk-walk; so with a clerk's situation of eighty pounds a year; so with an errand boy's place at three shillings a week, which thirty candidates want, and only one can get. Alas for our fallen race! Is it not part, at least, of some men's pleasure in gaining some object which has been generally sought for, to think of the mortification of the poor fellows that failed? Disappointment, in short, may come and must come wherever man can set his wishes and his hopes. The only way not to be disappointed when a thing turns out against you, is not to have really cared how the thing went. It is not a truism to remark that this is impossible if you did care. Of course, you are not disappointed at failing of attaining an end which you did not care whether you attained or not; but men seek very few such ends. If a man has worked day and night for six weeks in canvassing his county, and then, having been ignominiously beaten, on the following day tells you he is not in the least degree disappointed, he might just as truy assure you, if you met him walking up streaming with water from a river into which he had just fallen, that he is not the least wet. No doubt there is an elasticity in the healthy mind which very soon tides it over even a severe disappointment; and no doubt the grapes which are unattainable do sometimes in actual fact turn sour. But let no man tell us that he has not known the bitterness of disappointment for at least a brief space, if he have ever from his birth tried to get any thing, great or small, and yet not got it. Failure is indeed a thing of all degrees, from the most fanciful to the most weighty: disappointment is a thing of all degrees, from the transient feeling that worries for a minute, to the great crushing blow that breaks the mind's spring forever. Failure is a fact which reaches from the poor tramp who lies down by the wayside to die, up to the man who is only made chief justice when he wanted the chancellorship, or who dies bishop of London when he had set his heart upon being archbishop of Canterbury; or to the prime minister, unrivalled in eloquence, in influence, in genius, with his fair domains and his proud descent, but whose horse is beaten after being first favorite for the Derby. Who shall say that either disappointed man felt less bitterness and weariness of heart than the other? Each was no more than disappointed; and the keenness of disappointment bears no proportion to the reality or the value of the object whose loss caused it. And what endless crowds of human beings, children and old men, nobles and snobs, rich men and poor, know the bitterness of disappointment from day to day. It begins from the child shedding many tears when the toy bought with the long-hoarded pence is broken the first day it comes home; it goes on to the duke expecting the Garter, who sees in the newspaper at breakfast that the yards of blue ribbon have been given to another. What a hard time his servants have that day. How loudly he roars at them, how willingly would he kick them! Little recks he that forenoon of his magnificent castle and his ancestra. woods. It may here be mentioned that a very pleasing opportunity is afforded to malignant people for mortifying a clever, ambitious man, when any office is vacant to which it is known he aspires. A judge of the Queen's Bench has died: you, Mr. Verjuice, know how Mr. Swetter, Q.C., has been rising at the bar; you know how well he deserves the ermine. Wel., walk down to his chambers; go in and sit down; never mind how busy he is-your time is of no value-and talk of many different men as extremely suitable for the vacant seat on the bench, but never in the remotest manner hint at the claims of Swetter himself. I have often seen the like done. And you, Mr. Verjuice, may conclude almost with certainty that in doing all this you are vexing and mortifying a deserving man. And such some fees did earn; Cursed be the clerk and parson; CURSED BE a consideration will no doubt be compensation | "Cursed be the foul apprentice, who his loata. sufficient to your amiable nature for the fact that every generous muscular Christian would like to take you by the neck, and swing your sneaking carcass out of the window. THE WHOLE CONCERN!" A It may be mentioned here as a fact to which experience will testify, that such disappointments as that at the railway station and the post-office are most likely to come when you are counting with absolute certainty upon things happening as you wish; when not a misgiving has entered your mind as to your friend arriving or your letter coming. little latent fear in your soul that you may possibly be disappointed, seems to have a certain power to fend off disappointment, on the same principle on which taking out an umbrella is found to prevent rain. What you are prepared for rarely happens. The precise thing you expected comes not once in a thousand times. A confused state of mind results from long experience of such cases. Your real feeling often is: Such a thing seems quite sure to happen; I may say I expect it to happen; and yet I don't expect it, because I do: for experience has taught me that the precise thing which I expect, which I think most likely, hardly ever comes. I am not prepared to side with a thoughtless world, which is ready to laugh at the confused statement of the Irishman who had killed his pig. It is not a bull; it is a great psychological fact that is involved in his seemingly contradictory declaration-"It did not weigh as much as I expected, and I never thought it would!" Even a slight disappointment, speedily to be repaired, has in it something that jars painfully the mechanism of the mind. You go to the train, expecting a friend, certainly. He does not come. Now this worries you, even though you receive at the station a telegraphic message that he will be by the train which follows in two hours. Your magazine fails to come by post on the last day of the month; you have a dull, vague sense of something wanting for an hour or two, even though you are sure that you will have it next morning. And indeed, a very large share of the disappointments of civilized life are associated with the post-office. I do not suppose the extreme case of the poor fellow who calls at the office expecting a letter containing the money without which he cannot see how he is to get through the day; nor of the man who finds no letter on the day when he expects to hear how it fares with a dear relative who is desperately sick. I am thinking merely of the lesser disappointments which commonly attend post-time: the Times not coming when you were counting with more than ordinary certainty on its appearing; the letter of no great consequence, which yet you would have liked to have had. A certain blankness-a feeling difficult to define-attends even the slightest disappointment; and the effect of a great one is very stunning and embittering indeed. You remember how the nobleman in Ten Thousand a Year, who had been refused a seat in the Cabinet, sympathized with poor Titmouse's exclamation when, looking at the manifestations of gay life in Hyde-park, and feeling his own absolute exclusion from it, he consigned every thing to perdition. All the ballads of Professor Aytoun and Mr. Theodore Martin are admirable, but there is none which strikes me as more so than the brilliant imitation of Locksley Hall. And how true to nature the state of mind ascribed to the vulgar snob who is the hero of the ballad, who, bethinking himself of his great disappointment when his cousin married somebody ture; sometimes prolonging even into age a else, bestowed his extremest objurgations upon all who had abetted the hateful result, and then summed up thus comprehensively : When young ladies tell us that such and such a person "has met with a disappointment," we all understand what is meant. The phrase, though it is conventionally intelligible enough, involves a fallacy: it seems to teach that the disappointment of the youthful heart in the matter of that which in its day is no doubt the most powerful of all the affections, is by emphasis the greatest disappointment which a human being can ever know. Of course, that is an entire mistake. People get over that disappointment: not but what it may leave its trace, and possibly color the whole of remaining life; sometimes resulting in an unlovely bitterness and hardness of na lingering thread of old romance, and keeping a kindly corner in a heart which worldly cares have in great measure deadened. But the disappointment which has its seat in the af the strong." I suppose no one will say that the bishops are the greatest men in the Church of England, or that every chief justice is a greater man than every puisne judge. Success is especially arbitrary in cases where it goes by pure patronage: in many such cases the patron would smile at your weakness if you fancied that the desire to find the best man ever entered his head. In the matter of the bench and bar, where tangible duties are to be performed, a patron is compelled to a certain amount of decency; for, though he may not pretend to seek for the fittest man, he must at least profess to have sought a fit man. No prime minister dare appoint a blockhead a judge, without at least denying loudly that he is a block head. But the arbitrariness of success is frequently fections is outgrown as the affections them-¡this be said in any thing of a grumbling or selves are outgrown, as the season of their captious spirit. It is but repeating what a predominance passes away; and the disap- very wise man said long ago, that "the race pointment which sinks the deepest and lasts is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the longest of all the disappointments which are fanciful rather than material, is that which reaches a man through his ambition and his self-love, principles in his nature which outlast the heyday of the heart's supremacy, and which endure to man's latest years. The bitter and the enduring disappointment to most human beings is that which makes them feel, in one way or other, that they are less wise, clever, popular, graceful, accomplished, tall, active, and, in short, fine, than they had fancied themselves to be. But it is only to a limited portion of human kind that such words as disappointment and success are mainly suggestive of gratified or disappointed ambition, of happy or blighted affection; to the great majority they are suggestive rather of success or non-success in earning bread and cheese, in finding money to pay the rent, in generally the result of causes quite apart from any making the ends meet. You are very young, arbitrariness in the intention of the human my reader, and little versed in the practical disposer of success; a Higher Hand seems to affairs of ordinary life, if you do not know come in here. The tide of events settles the that such prosaic matters make to most men matter: the arbitrariness is in the way in the great aim of their being here, so far as which the tide of events sets. Think of that that aim is bounded by this world's horizon. great lawyer and great man, Sir Samuel The poor cabman is successful or is disap- Romilly. Through years of his practice at pointed according as he sees, while the hours the bar, he himself, and all who knew him, of the day are passing over, that he is mak-looked to the woolsack as his certain destinaing up or not making up the shillings he must tion. You remember the many entries in his hand over to his master at night, before he diary bearing upon the matter; and I suphas a penny to get food for his wife and chil- pose the opinion of the most competent was dren. The little tradesman is successful or clear as to his unrivalled fitness for the post. the reverse, according as he sees or does not Yet all ended in nothing. The race was not see from week to week such a small accumu- to the swift. The first favorite was beaten, lation of petty profits as may pay his landlord, and more than one outsider has carried off and leave a little margin by help of which he the prize for which he strove in vain. Did and his family may struggle on. And many any mortal ever dream, during his days of an educated man knows the analogous feel- mediocrity at the bar, or his time of respectings. The poor barrister, as he waits for the ability as a baron of the Exchequer, that Sir briefs which come in so slowly-the young R. M. Rolfe was the future chancellor ? doctor, hoping for patients-understand them Probably there is no sphere in which there all. Oh, what slight, fanciful things, to such is more of disappointment and heartburning men, appear such disappointments as that of the wealthy proprietor who fails to carry his county, or the rich mayor or provost who fails of being knighted! than the army. It must be supremely mortifying to a gray-headed veteran, who has served his country for forty years, to find a beardless Guardsman put over his head into There is an extraordinary arbitrariness the command of his regiment, and to see about the way in which great success is honors and emoluments showered upon that aliotted in this world. Who shall say that fair-weather colonel. And I should judge in one case out of every two, relative success that the despatch written by a general after is in proportion to relative merit? Nor need an important battle must be a source of sad |