though the donkey was there.  Have you not, my philosophic friend, had your donkey?  I mean your moral donkey.  Yes, and scores of such.  When you were a schoolboy, longing for the holidays, have you not chalked upon doors the legend—­oh for August!  Vague, delightful visions of perfect happiness were wrapped up in the words.  But the holidays came, as all holidays have done and will do; and in a few days you were heartily wearied of them.  When you were spoony about Marjory Anne, you thought that once your donkey came, once you were fairly married and settled, what a fine thing it would be!  I do not say a syllable against that youthful matron; but I presume you have discovered that she falls short of perfection, and that wedded life has its many cares.  You thought you would enjoy so much the setting-up of your carriage; your wife and you often enjoyed it by anticipation on dusty summer days:  but though all very well, wood and iron and leather never made the vehicle that shall realize your anticipations.  The horses were often lame; the springs would sometimes break; the paint was always getting scratched and the lining cut.  Oh, what a nuisance is a carriage!  You fancied you would be perfectly happy when you retired from business and settled in the country.  What a comment upon such fancies is the fashion in which retired men of business haunt the places of their former toils like unquiet ghosts!  How sick they get of the country!  I do not think of grand disappointments of the sort; of the satiety of Vathek, turning sickly away from his earthly paradise at Cintra; nor of the graceful towers I have seen rising from a woody cliff above a summer sea, and of the story told me of their builder, who, after rearing them, lost interest in them, and in sad disappointment left them to others, and went back to the busy town wherein he had made his wealth.  I think of men, more than one or two, who rented their acre of land by the sea-side, and built their pretty cottage, made their grassplots and trained their roses, and then in unaccustomed idleness grew weary of the whole and sold their place to some keen bargain-maker for a tithe of what it cost them.

Why is it that failure in attaining ambitious ends is so painful?  When one has honestly done one’s best, and is beaten after all, conscience must be satisfied:  the wound is solely to self-love; and is it not to the discredit of our nature that that should imply such a weary, blank, bitter feeling as it often does?  Is it that every man has within his heart a lurking belief that, notwithstanding the world’s ignorance of the fact, there never was in the world anybody so remarkable as himself?  I think that many mortals need daily to be putting down a vague feeling which really comes to that.  You who have had experience of many men, know that you can hardly over-estimate the extent and depth of human vanity.  Never be afraid but that nine men out of ten will swallow with avidity flattery, however gross; especially if it ascribe to them those qualities of which they are most manifestly deficient.