of four-and-twenty,—­selected out of near twenty thousand.  It is possible, indeed, that you may feel more reason for shame than for elation at the thought.  A barrister unknown to fame, but of respectable stantling, may be made a judge.  Such a man may even, if he gets into the groove, be gradually pushed on till he reaches an eminence which probably surprises himself as much as any one else.  A good speaker in Parliament may at sixty or seventy be made a Cabinet Minister.  And we can all imagine what indescribable pride and elation must in such cases possess the wife and daughters of the man who has attained this decided step in advance.  I can say sincerely that I never saw human beings walk with so airy tread, and evince so fussily their sense of a greatness more than mortal, as the wife and the daughter of an amiable but not able bishop I knew in my youth, when they came to church on the Sunday morning on which the good man preached for the first time in his lawn sleeves.  Their heads were turned for the time; but they gradually came right again, as the ladies became accustomed to the summits of human affairs.  Let it be said for the bishop himself, that there was not a vestige of that sense of elevation about him.  He looked perfectly modest and unaffected.  His dress was remarkably ill put on, and his sleeves stuck out in the most awkward fashion ever assumed by drapery.  I suppose that sometimes these rises in life come very unexpectedly.  I have heard of a man who, when he received a letter from the Prime Minister of the day offering him a place of great dignity, thought the letter was a hoax, and did not notice it for several days.  You could not certainly infer from his modesty what has proved to be the fact, that he has filled his place admirably well.  The possibility of such material changes must no doubt tend to prolong the interest in life, which is ready to flag as years go on.  But perhaps with the majority of men the level is found before middle age, and no very great worldly change awaits them.  The path stretches on, with its ups and downs; and they only hope for strength for the day.  But in such men’s lot of humble duty and quiet content there remains room for many fears.  All human beings who are as well off as they can ever be, and so who have little room for hope, seem to be liable to the invasion of great fear as they look into the future.  It seems to be so with kings, and with great nobles.  Many such have lived in a nervous dread of change, and have ever been watching the signs of the times with apprehensive eyes.  Nothing that can happen can well make such better; and so they suffer from the vague foreboding of something which will make them worse.  And the same law readies to those in whom hope is narrowed down, not by the limit of grand possibility, but of little,—­not by the fact that they have got all that mortal can get, but by the fact that they have got the little which is all that Providence seems to intend to give