I have been amused by the way in which some people meet disappointment.  They think it a great piece of worldly wisdom to deny that they have ever been disappointed at all.  Perhaps it might be so, if the pretext were less transparent than it is.  An old lady’s son is plucked at an examination for a civil appointment.  She takes up the ground that it is rather a credit to be plucked; that nearly everybody is plucked; that all the cleverest fellows are plucked; and that only stupid fellows are allowed to pass.  When the examiners find a clever man, they take a pleasure in plucking him.  A number of the cleverest men in England can easily put out a lad of one-and-twenty.  Then, shifting her ground, she declares the examination was ridiculously easy:  her son was rejected because he could not tell what two and two amount to:  because he did not know the name of the river on which London is built:  because he did not (in his confusion) know his own name.  She shows you the indignant letter which the young man wrote to her, announcing the scandalous injustice with which he was treated.  You remark three words misspelt in the first five lines; and you fancy you have fathomed the secret of the plucking.

I have sometimes tried, but in vain, to discover the law which regulates the attainment of extreme popularity.  Extreme popularity, in this country and age, appears a very arbitrary thing.  I defy any person to predict a priori what book, or song, or play, or picture, is to become the rage,—­to utterly transcend all competition.  I believe, indeed, that there cannot be popularity for even a short time, without some kind or degree of merit to deserve it; and in any case there is no other standard to which one can appeal than the deliberate judgment of the mass of educated persons.  If you are quite convinced that a thing is bad which all such think good, why, of course you are wrong.  If you honestly think Shakspeare a fool, you are aware you must be mistaken.  And so, if a book, or a picture, or a play, or a song, be really good, and if it be properly brought before the public notice, you may, as a general rule, predict that it will attain a certain measure of success.  But the inexplicable thing—­the thing of which I am quite unable to trace the law—­is extreme success.  How is it that one thing shoots ahead of everything else of the same class; and without being materially better, or even materially different, leaves everything else out of sight behind?  Why is it that Eclipse is first and the rest nowhere, while the legs and wind of Eclipse are no whit better than the legs and wind of all the rest?  If twenty novels of nearly equal merit are published, it is not impossible that one shall dart ahead of the remaining nineteen; that it shall be found in every library; that Mr. Mudie may announce that he has 3250 copies of it; that it shall be the talk of every circle; its incidents set to music, its plot dramatized; that it shall count readers by thousands while others count