mainly suggestive of gratified or disappointed ambition, of happy or blighted affection; to the great majority they are suggestive rather of success or non-success in earning bread and cheese, in finding money to pay the rent, in generally making the ends meet.  You are very young, my reader, and little versed in the practical affairs of ordinary life, if you do not know that such prosaic matters make to most men the great aim of their being here, so far as that aim is bounded by this world’s horizon.  The poor cabman is successful or is disappointed, according as he sees, while the hours of the day are passing over, that he is making up or not making up the shillings he must hand over to his master at night, before he has a penny to get food for his wife and children.  The little tradesman is successful or the reverse, according as he sees or does not see from week to week such a small accumulation of petty profits as may pay his landlord, and leave a little margin by help of which he and his family may struggle on.  And many an educated man knows the analogous feelings.  The poor barrister, as he waits for the briefs which come in so slowly—­the young doctor, hoping for patients—­understand them all.  Oh what slight, fanciful things, to such men, appear such disappointments as that of the wealthy proprietor who fails to carry his county, or the rich mayor or provost who fails of being knighted!

There is an extraordinary arbitrariness about the way in which great success is allotted in this world.  Who shall say that in one case out of every two, relative success is in proportion to relative merit?  Nor need this be said in anything of a grumbling or captious spirit.  It is but repeating what a very wise man said long ago, that ’the race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong.’  I suppose no one will say that the bishops are the greatest men in the Church of England, or that every Chief Justice is a greater man than every puisne judge.  Success is especially arbitrary in cases where it goes by pure patronage:  in many such cases the patron would smile at your weakness if you fancied that the desire to find the best man ever entered his head.  In the matter of the bench and bar, where tangible duties are to be performed, a patron is compelled to a certain amount of decency; for, though he may not pretend to seek for the fittest man, he must at least profess to have sought a fit man.  No prime minister dare appoint a blockhead a judge, without at least denying loudly that he is a blockhead.  But the arbitrariness of success is frequently the result of causes quite apart from any arbitrariness in the intention of the human disposer of success; a Higher Hand seems to come in here.  The tide of events settles the matter:  the arbitrariness is in the way in which the tide of events sets.  Think of that great lawyer and great man, Sir Samuel Romilly.  Through years of his practice at the bar, he himself, and all who knew him, looked to the