extreme case of the poor fellow who calls at the office expecting
a letter containing the money without which he cannot see how he
is to get through the day; nor of the man who finds no letter on
the day when he expects to hear how it fares with a dear relative
who is desperately sick. I am thinking merely of the lesser
disappointments which commonly attend post-time: the Times not
coming when you were counting with more than ordinary certainty
on its appearing; the letter of no great consequence, which yet
you would have liked to have had. A certain blankness--a feeling
difficult to define--attends even the slightest disappointment; and
the effect of a great one is very stunning and embittering indeed.
You remember how the nobleman in Ten Thousand a Year, who had been
refused a seat in the Cabinet, sympathized with poor Titmouse's
exclamation when, looking at the manifestations of gay life
in Hyde-park, and feeling his own absolute exclusion from it, he
consigned everything to perdition. All the ballads of Professor
Aytoun and Mr. Theodore Martin are admirable, but there is none
which strikes me as more so than the brilliant imitation of Locksley
Hall, And how true to nature the state of mind ascribed to the
vulgar snob who is the hero of the ballad, who, bethinking himself
of his great disappointment when his cousin married somebody else,
bestowed his extremest objurgations upon all who had abetted the
hateful result, and then summed up thus comprehensively:--

Cursed be the foul apprentice, who his loathsome fees did earn;
Cursed be the clerk and parson; CURSED BE THE WHOLE CONCERN!

It may be mentioned here as a fact to which experience will testify,
that such disappointments as that at the railway station and the
post-office are most likely to come when you are counting with