The writer always feels a peculiar sympathy with failure, and with people who are suffering from disappointment, great or small.  It is not that he himself is a disappointed man.  No; he has to confess, with deep thankfulness, that his success has far, very far, transcended his deserts.  And, like many other men, he has found that one or two events in his life, which seemed disappointments at the time, were in truth great and signal blessings.  Still, every one has known enough of the blank, desolate feeling of disappointment, to sympathize keenly with the disappointments of others.  I feel deeply for the poor Punch and Judy man, simulating great excitement in the presence of a small, uninterested group, from which people keep dropping away.  I feel for the poor barn-actor, who discovers, on his first entrance upon his rude stage, that the magnates of the district, who promised to be present at the performance, have not come.  You have gone to see a panorama, or to hear a lecture on phrenology.  Did you not feel for the poor fellow, the lecturer or exhibitor, when ne came in ten minutes past the hour, and found little but empty benches?  Did you not see what a chill fell upon him:  how stupified he seemed:  in short, how much disappointed he was?  And if the money he had hoped to earn that evening was to pay the lodgings in which he and his wife were staying, you may be sure there was a heart sickness about his disappointment far beyond the mortification of mere self-love.  When a rainy day stops a pic-nic, or mars the enjoyment of it, although the disappointment is hardly a serious one, still it is sure to cause so much real suffering, that only rancorous old ladies will rejoice in the fact.  It is curious how men who have known disappointment themselves, and who describe it well, seem to like to paint lives which in the meantime are all hope and success.  There is Mr. Thackeray.  With what sympathy, with what enjoyment, he shows us the healthy, wealthy, hopeful youths, like Clive Newcome, or young Pendennis, when it was all sunshine around the young prince!  And yet how sad a picture of life he gives us in The Newcomes.  It would not have done to make it otherwise:  it is true, though sad:  that history of the good and gallant gentleman, whose life was a long disappointment, a long failure in all on which he had set his heart; in his early love, in his ambitious plans for his son, even in his hopes for his son’s happiness, in his own schemes of fortune, till that life of honour ended in the almshouse at last.  How the reader wishes that the author would make brighter days dawn upon his hero!  But the author cannot:  he must hold on unflinchingly as fate.  In such a story as his, truth can no more be sacrificed to our wishes than in real life we know it to be.  Well, all disappointment is discipline; and received in a right spirit, it may prepare us for better things elsewhere.  It has been said that heaven is a place for those who failed on earth.  The greatest hero is perhaps