any speaker within living memory.  Take heart, all sufferers, when you hear what follows.  For eleven long years the gallant orator steadily endeavoured to repair his early failure; he spoke frequently, asserted himself without caring for the jeers of his enemies, and finally he won the leadership of the House by dint of perseverance, tact, and intellect.  We cannot tell how often his heart sank within him during those weary years; we know nothing of his forebodings; we only know that outwardly he always appeared alert, vigorous, strenuously hopeful.  At last his name was known all over the world, and, after his death, a traveller who rode across Asia Minor was again and again questioned by the wild nomads—­“Is your great Sheikh dead?” they asked.  The rumour of our statesman’s power had traversed the earth.  Men of all parties acknowledge the indomitable courage of this man who refused to resign the struggle even when the very Fates seemed to have decreed his ruin.

Take a man of another stamp, and observe how he met the first blows of Fortune.  Thomas Carlyle had dwelt on a lonely moorland for six years.  He came to London and employed himself with feverish energy on a book which he thought would win him bread, even if it did not gain him fame.  Writing was painful to him, and he never set down a sentence without severe labour.  With infinite pains he sought out the history of the French Revolution and obtained a clear picture of that tremendous event.  Piece by piece he put his first volume together and satisfied himself that he had done something which would live.  He handed his precious manuscript to Stuart Mill, and Mill’s servant lit the fire with it.  Carlyle had exhausted his means, and his great work was really his only capital.  Like all men who write at high pressure, he was unable to recall anything that he had once set down, and, so far as his priceless volume went, his mind was a blank.  Years of toil were thrown away; time was fleeting, and the world was careless of the matchless historian.  The first news of his loss stunned him, and, had he been a weak man, he would have collapsed under the blow.  He saw nothing but bitter poverty for himself and his wife, and he had some thoughts of betaking himself to the Far West; but he conquered his weakness, forgot his despair in labour, and doggedly re-wrote the masterpiece which raised him to instant fame and caused him to be regarded as one of the first men in Britain.  In the whole wide history of human trials I cannot recall a more shining instance of fortitude and triumphant victory over obstacles.  Let those who are cast down by some petty trouble think of the lonely, poverty-stricken student bending himself to his task after the very light of his life had been dimmed for a while.