HOPE, they say, deserts us at no period of our existence.
From first to last, and in the face of smarting disillusions,
we continue to expect good fortune, better health, and better
conduct; and that so confidently, that we judge it needless to
deserve them. I think it improbable that I shall ever write
like Shakespeare, conduct an army like Hannibal, or
distinguish myself like Marcus Aurelius in the paths of
virtue; and yet I have my by-days, hope prompting, when I am
very ready to believe that I shall combine all these various
excellences in my own person, and go marching down to
posterity with divine honours. There is nothing so monstrous
but we can believe it of ourselves. About ourselves, about
our aspirations and delinquencies, we have dwelt by choice in
a delicious vagueness from our boyhood up. No one will have
forgotten Tom Sawyer's aspiration: "Ah, if he could only die
TEMPORARILY!" Or, perhaps, better still, the inward
resolution of the two pirates, that "so long as they remained
in that business, their piracies should not again be sullied
with the crime of stealing." Here we recognise the thoughts
of our boyhood; and our boyhood ceased - well, when? - not, I
think, at twenty; nor, perhaps, altogether at twenty-five; nor
yet at thirty; and possibly, to be quite frank, we are still
in the thick of that arcadian period. For as the race of man,
after centuries of civilisation, still keeps some traits of
their barbarian fathers, so man the individual is not
altogether quit of youth, when he is already old and honoured,
and Lord Chancellor of England. We advance in years somewhat
in the manner of an invading army in a barren land; the age
that we have reached, as the phrase goes, we but hold with an