Disappointment, in short, may come and must come wherever man can set his wishes and his hopes.  The only way not to be disappointed when a thing turns out against you, is not to have really cared how the thing went.  It is not a truism to remark that this is impossible if you did care.  Of course you are not disappointed at failing of attaining an end which you did not care whether you attained or not; but men seek very few such ends.  If a man has worked day and night for six weeks in canvassing his county, and then, having been ignominiously beaten, on the following day tells you he is not in the least degree disappointed, he might just as trulv assure you, if you met him walking up streaming with water from a river into which he had just fallen, that he is not the least wet.  No doubt there is an elasticity in the healthy mind which very soon tides it over even a severe disappointment; and no doubt the grapes which are unattainable do sometimes in actual fact turn sour.  But let no man tell us that he has not known the bitterness of disappointment for at least a brief space, if he have ever from his birth tried to get anything, great or small, and yet not got it.  Failure is indeed a thing of all degrees, from the most fanciful to the most weighty:  disappointment is a thing of all degrees, from the transient feeling that worries for a minute, to the great crushing blow that breaks the mind’s spring for ever.  Failure is a fact which reaches from the poor tramp who lies down by the wayside to die, up to the man who is only made Chief Justice when he wanted the Chancellorship, or who dies Bishop of London when he had set his heart upon being Archbishop of Canterbury; or to the Prime Minister, unrivalled in eloquence, in influence, in genius, with his fair domains and his proud descent, but whose horse is beaten after being first favourite for the Derby.  Who shall say that either disappointed man felt less bitterness and weariness of heart than the other?  Each was no more than disappointed; and the keenness of disappointment bears no proportion to the reality of the value of the object whose loss caused it.  And what endless crowds of human beings, children and old men, nobles and snobs, rich men and poor, know the bitterness of disappointment from day to day.  It begins from the child shedding many tears when the toy bought with the long-hoarded pence is broken the first day it comes home; it goes on to the Duke expecting the Garter, who sees in the newspaper. at breakfast that the yards of blue ribbon have been given to another.  What a hard time his servants have that day.  How loudly he roars at them, how willingly would he kick them!  Little recks he that forenoon of his magnificent castle and his ancestral woods.  It may here be mentioned that a very pleasing opportunity is afforded to malignant people for mortifying a clever, ambitious man, when any office is vacant to which it is known he aspires.  A judge of the Queen’s Bench has died:  you,