tide.  You have got a fair living and a fair standing in the Church; you have held them for eight or ten years; when some evening as you are sitting in your study or playing with your children, a servant tells you, doubtfully, that a man is waiting to see you.  A poor, thin, shabbily-dressed fellow comes in, and in faltering tones begs for the lean of five shillings.  Ah, with what a start you recognise him!  It is the clever fellow whom you hardly beat at college, who was always so lively and merry, who sang so nicely, and was so much asked out into society.  You had lost sight of him for several years; and now here he is, shabby, dirty, smelling of whisky, with bloated face and trembling hand:  alas, alas, ruined!  Oh, do not give him up.  Perhaps you can do something for him.  Little kindness he has known for very long.  Give him the five shillings by all means; but next morning see you go out, and try what may be done to lift him out of the slough of despond, and to give him a chance for better days!  I know that it may be all in vain; and that after years gradually darkening down you may some day, as you pass the police-office, find a crowd at the door, and learn that they have got the corpse of the poor suicide within.  And even when the failure is not so utter as this, you find, now and then, as life goes onward, that this and that old acquaintance has, you cannot say how, stepped out of the track, and is stranded.  He went into the Church:  he is no worse preacher or scholar than many that succeed; but somehow he never gets a living.  You sometimes meet him in the street, threadbare and soured:  he probably passes you without recognising you.  O reader, to whom God has sent moderate success, always be chivalrously kind and considerate to such a disappointed man!

I have heard of an eminent man who, when well advanced in years, was able to say that through all his life he had never set his mind on anything which he did not succeed in attaining.  Great and little aims alike, he never had known what it was to fail.  What a curious state of feeling it would be to most men to know themselves able to assert so much!  Think of a mind in which disappointment is a thing unknown!  I think that one would be oppressed by a vague sense of fear in regarding one’s self as treated by Providence in a fashion so different from the vast majority of the race.  It cannot be denied that there are men in this world in whose lot failure seems to be the rule.  Everything to which they put their hand breaks down or goes amiss.  But most human beings can testify that their lot, like their abilities, their stature, is a sort of middling thing.  There is about it an equable sobriety, a sort of average endurableness.  Some things go well:  some things go ill.  There is a modicum of disappointment:  there is a modicum of success.  But so much of disappointment comes to the lot of almost all, that there is no object in nature at which we all look with so much interest