and their mothers think them equal to anything.  Sometimes justly; sometimes the fact justifies the anticipation.  When Baron Alderson went to Cambridge, he tells us that he would have spurned the offer of being second man of his year; and sure enough, he was out of sight the first.  But for one man of whom the home estimation is no more than just, there are ten thousand in whose case, to strangers, it appears simply preposterous.

There is one sense in which all after-life may be said to be a disappointment.  It is far different from that which it was pictured by early anticipations and hopes.  The very greatest material success still leaves the case thus.  And no doubt it seems strange to many to look back on the fancies of youth, which experience has sobered down.  When you go back, my reader, to the village where you were brought up, don’t you remember how you used to fancy that when you were a man you would come to it in your carriage and four?  This, it is unnecessary to add, you have not yet done.  You thought likewise that when you came back you would be arrayed in a scarlet coat, possibly in a cuirass of steel; whereas in fact you have come to the little inn where nobody knows you to spend the night, and you are wandering along the bank of the river (how little changed!) in a shooting-jacket of shepherd’s plaid.  You intended to marry the village grocer’s pretty daughter; and for that intention probably you were somewhat hastily dismissed to a school a hundred miles off; but this evening as you passed the shop you discovered her, a plump matron, calling to her children in a voice rather shrill than sweet; and you discovered from the altered sign above the door that her father is dead, and that she has married the shopman, your hated rival of former years.  And yet how happily the wind is tempered to the shorn lamb!  You are not the least mortified.  You are much amused that your youthful fancies have been blighted.  It would have been fearful to have married that excellent individual; the shooting-jacket is greatly more comfortable than the coat of mail; and as for the carriage and four, why, even if you could afford them, you would seldom choose to drive four horses.  And it is so with the more substantial anticipations of maturer years.  The man who, as already mentioned, intended to be a Chief Justice, is quite happy when he is made a County Court judge.  The man who intended to eclipse Mr. Dickens in the arts of popular authorship is content and proud to be the great writer of the London Journal.  The clergyman who would have liked a grand cathedral like York Minster is perfectly pleased with his little country church, ivy-green and grey.  We come, if we are sensible folk, to be content with what we can get, though we have not what we could wish.