seems to be the rule. Everything to which they put their hand breaks
down or goes amiss. But most human beings can testify that their
lot, like their abilities, their stature, is a sort of middling
thing. There is about it an equable sobriety, a sort of average
endurableness. Some things go well: some things go ill. There is
a modicum of disappointment: there is a modicum of success. But so
much of disappointment comes to the lot of almost all, that there
is no object in nature at which we all look with so much interest
as the invariably lucky man--the man whom all this system of things
appears to favour. You knew such a one at school: you knew him at
college: you knew him at the bar, in the Church, in medicine, in
politics, in society. Somehow he pushes his way: things turn up
just at the right time for him: great people take a fancy to him:
the newspapers cry him up. Let us hope that you do not look at him
with any feeling of envy or bitterness; but you cannot help looking
at him with great interest, he is so like yourself, and at the same
time so very unlike you. Philosophers tell us that real happiness
is very equally distributed; but there is no doubt that there is a
tremendous external difference between the man who lives in a grand
house, with every appliance of elegance and luxury, with plump
servants, fine horses, many carriages, and the poor struggling
gentleman, perhaps a married curate, whose dwelling is bare, whose
dress is poor, whose fare is scanty, whose wife is careworn, whose
children are ill-fed, shabbily dressed, and scantily educated.
It is conceivable that fanciful wants, slights, and failures, may
cause the rich man as much and as real suffering as substantial
wants and failures cause the poor; but the world at large will
recognise the rich man's lot as one of success, and the poor man's
as one of failure.