he may be placed; the great mass of ordinary men can make little headway with wind and tide dead against them.  Not many trees would grow well, if watered daily (let us say) with vitriol.  Yet a tree which would speedily die under that nurture might do very fairly, might even do magnificently, if it had fair play, if it got its chance of common sunshine and shower.  Some men, indeed, though always hampered by circumstances, have accomplished much; but then you cannot help thinking how much more they might have accomplished, had they been placed more happily.  Pugin, the great Gothic architect, designed various noble buildings; but I believe he complained that he never had fair play with his finest,—­that he was always weighted by considerations of expense, or by the nature of the ground he had to build on, or by the number of people it was essential the building should accommodate.  And so he regarded his noblest edifices as no more than hints of what he could have done.  He made grand running in the race; but, oh, what running he could have made, if you had taken off those twelve additional pounds!  I dare say you have known men who labored to make a pretty country-house on a site which had some one great drawback.  They were always battling with that drawback, and trying to conquer it; but they never could quite succeed.  And it remained a real worry and vexation.  Their house was on the north side of a high hill, and never could have its due share of sunshine.  Or you could not reach it but by climbing a very steep ascent; or you could not in any way get water into the landscape.  When Sir Walter was at length able to call his own a little estate on the banks of the Tweed he loved so well, it was the ugliest, bleakest, and least interesting spot upon the course of that beautiful river; and the public road ran within a few yards of his door.  The noble-hearted man made a charming dwelling at last; but he was fighting against Nature in the matter of the landscape round it; and you can see yet, many a year after he left it, the poor little trees of his beloved plantations contrasting with the magnificent timber of various grand old places above and below Abbotsford.  There is something sadder in the sight of men who carried weight within themselves, and who, in aiming at usefulness or at happiness, were hampered and held back by their own nature.  There are many men who are weighted with a hasty temper; weighted with a nervous, anxious constitution; weighted with an envious, jealous disposition; weighted with a strong tendency to evil speaking, lying, and slandering; weighted with a grumbling, sour, discontented spirit; weighted with a disposition to vaporing and boasting; weighted with a great want of common sense; weighted with an undue regard to what other people may be thinking or saying of them; weighted with many like things, of which more will be said by-and-by.  When that good missionary, Henry Martyn, was in India, he was weighted with an irresistible drowsiness.  He could