one likes.  You like a person; and he is good.  That seems the whole case.  You do not go into exceptions and reservations.  I remember how indignant I felt, as a boy, at reading some depreciatory criticism of the “Waverley Novels.”  The criticism was to the effect that the plots generally dragged at first, and were huddled up at the end.  But to me the novels were enchaining, enthralling; and to hint a defect in them stunned one.  In the boy’s feeling, if a thing be good, why, there cannot be anything bad about it.  But in the man’s mature judgment, even in the people he likes best, and in the things he appreciates most highly, there are many flaws and imperfections.  It does not vex us much now to find that this is so; but it would have greatly vexed us many years since to have been told that it would be so.  I can well imagine, that, if you told a thoughtful and affectionate child, how well he would some day get on, far from his parents and his home, his wish would be that any evil might befall him rather than that!  We shrink with terror from the prospect of things which we can take easily enough when they come.  I dare say Lord Chancellor Thurlow was moderately sincere when he exclaimed in the House of Peers, “When I forget my king, may my God forget me!” And you will understand what Leigh Hunt meant, when, in his pleasant poem of “The Palfrey,” he tells us of a daughter who had lost a very bad and heartless father by death, that,

  “The daughter wept, and wept the more,
  To think her tears would soon be o’er.”

Even in middle age, one sad thought which comes in the prospect of Future Years is of the change which they are sure to work upon many of our present views and feelings.  And the change, in many cases, will be to the worse.  One thing is certain,—­that your temper will grow worse, if it do not grow better.  Years will sour it, if they do not mellow it.  Another certain thing is, that, if you do not grow wiser, you will be growing more foolish.  It is very true that there is no fool so foolish as an old fool.  Let us hope, my friend, that, whatever be our honest worldly work, it may never lose its interest.  We must always speak humbly about the changes which coming time will work upon us, upon even our firmest resolutions and most rooted principles; or I should say for myself that I cannot even imagine myself the same being, with bent less resolute and heart less warm to that best of all employments which is the occupation of my life.  But there are few things which, as we grow older, impress us more deeply than the transitoriness of thoughts and feelings in human hearts.