in seeing that he was (at a certain period) a fool, he had come to discern that of which his friends had always been aware.  Of course, early interests do not always die out.  You remember Dr. Chalmers, and the ridiculous exhibition about the wretched little likeness of an early sweetheart, not seen for forty years, and long since in her grave.  You remember the singular way in which he signified his remembrance of her, in his famous and honored age.  I don’t mean the crying, nor the walking up and down the garden-walk calling her by fine names.  I mean the taking out his card:  not his carte; you could understand that:  but his visiting-card bearing his name, and sticking it behind the portrait with two wafers.  Probably it pleased him to do so; and assuredly it did harm to no one else.  And we have all heard of the like things.  Early affections are sometimes, doubtless, cherished in the memory of the old.  But still, more material interests come in, and the old affection is crowded out of its old place in the heart.  And so those comparatively fanciful disappointments sit lightly.  The romance is gone.  The mid-day sun beats down, and there lies the dusty way.  When the cantankerous and unamiable mother of Christopher North stopped his marriage with a person at least as respectable as herself, on the ground that the person was not good enough, we are told that the future professor nearly went mad, and that he never quite got over it.  But really, judging from his writings and his biography, he bore up under it, after a little, wonderfully well.

But looking back to the days which the old yellow letters bring back, you will think to yourself, Where are the hopes and anticipations of that time?  You expected to be a great man, no doubt.  Well, you know you are not.  You are a small man, and never will be anything else; yet you are quite resigned.  If there be an argument which stirs me to indignation at its futility, and to wonder that any mortal ever regarded it as of the slightest force, it is that which is set out in the famous soliloquy in “Cato,” as to the Immortality of the Soul.  Will any sane man say, that, if in this world you wish for a thing very much, and anticipate it very clearly and confidently, you are therefore sure to get it?  If that were so, many a little schoolboy would end by driving his carriage and four, who ends by driving no carriage at all.  I have heard of a man whose private papers were found after his death all written over with his signature as he expected it would be when he became Lord Chancellor.  Let us say his peerage was to be as Lord Smith.  There it was, SMITH, C., SMITH, C., written in every conceivable fashion, so that the signature, when needed, might be easy and imposing.  That man had very vividly anticipated the woolsack, the gold robe, and all the rest.  It need hardly be said, he attained none of these.  The famous argument, you know of course, is, that man has a great