charioteer. Give us the safe and steady man. Everybody knows that
the same usage applies to the Primacy in England. Bishops must be
sensible; but archbishops are by some regarded with suspicion if
they have ever committed themselves to sentiments more startling
than that two and two make four. Let me suppose, my reader, that you
have met with great success: I mean success which is very great in
your own especial field. The lists are just put out, and you are
senior wrangler; or you have got the gold medal in some country
grammar-school. The feeling in both cases is the same. In each case
there combines with the exultant emotion, an intellectual conception
that you are one of the greatest of the human race. Well, was
not the feeling a strange one? Did you not feel somewhat afraid?
It seemed too much. Something was sure to come, you thought, that
would take you down. Few are burdened with such a feeling; but surely
there is something alarming in great success. You were a barber's
boy: you are made a peer. Surely you must go through life with an
ever-recurring emotion of surprise at finding yourself where you
are. It must be curious to occupy a place whence you look down upon
the heads of most of your kind. A duke gets accustomed to it; but
surely even he must sometimes wonder how he comes to be placed so
many degrees above multitudes who deserve as well. Or do such come
to fancy that their merit is equal to their success; and that by
as much as they are better off than other men, they are better than
other men? Very likety they do. It is all in human nature. And I
suppose the times have been in which it would have been treasonable
to hint that a man with a hundred thousand pounds a year was not
at least two thousand times as good as one with fifty.

The writer always feels a peculiar sympathy with failure, and with
people who are suffering from disappointment, great or small. It is