of childhood,” we know from Goldsmith, “satisfy the child.”  The sorrows of childhood overwhelm the poor little thing.  I think a sympathetic reader would hardly read without a tear, as well as a smile, an incident in the early life of Patrick Fraser Tytler, recorded in his biography.  When five years old, he got hold of the gun of an elder brother and broke the spring of its lock.  What anguish the little boy must have endured, what a crushing sense of having caused an irremediable evil, before he sat down and printed in great letters the following epistle to his brother, the owner of the gun:—­“Oh, Jamie, think no more of guns, for the main-spring of that is broken, and my heart is broken!” Doubtless the poor little fellow fancied that for all the remainder of his life he never could feel as he had felt before he touched the unlucky weapon.  And looking back over many years, most of us can remember a child crushed and overwhelmed by some trouble which it thought could never be got over; and we can feel for our early self as though sympathizing with another being.

What I wish in this essay is, that we should look away along the path we have come in life; and that we should see, that, though many cares and troubles may now press upon us, still we may well be content.  I speak to ordinary people, whose lot has been an ordinary lot.  I know there are exceptional cases; but I firmly believe, that, as for most of us, we never have seen better days than these.  No doubt, in the retrospect of early youth, we seem to see a time when the summer was brighter, the flowers sweeter, the snowy days of winter more cheerful, than we ever find them now.  But, in sober sense, we know that it is all an illusion.  It is only as the man travelling over the burning desert sees sparkling water and shady trees where he knows there is nothing but arid sand.

I dare say you know that one of the acutest of living men has maintained that it is foolish to grieve over past suffering.  He says, truly enough in one sense, that the suffering which is past is as truly non-existent as the suffering which has never been at all; that, in fact, past suffering is now nothing, and is entitled to no more consideration than that to which nothing is entitled.  No doubt, when bodily pain has ceased, it is all over:  we do not feel it any more.  And you have probably observed that the impression left by bodily pain passes very quickly away.  The sleepless night, or the night of torment from toothache, which seemed such a distressing reality while it was dragging over, looks a very shadowy thing the next forenoon.  But it may be doubted whether you will ever so far succeed in overcoming the fancies and weaknesses of humanity as to get people to cease to feel that past sufferings and sorrows are a great part of their present life.  The remembrance of our past life is a great part of our present life.  And, indeed, the greater part of human suffering consists in its anticipation and in its recollection.