they cannot achieve! What mortification and disappointment they must
often know! The horse backs on to the pavement, into a plate-glass
window, just as Maria, for whose sake the poor screw was hired, is
passing by. The boys halloo in derision; and some ostler, helpful,
but not complimentary, extricates the rider, and says, 'I see you
have never been on 'ossback before; you should not have pulled the
curb-bit that way!' And when the vulgar dandy, strutting along,
with his Brummagem jewellery, his choking collar, and his awfully
tight boots which cause him agony, meets the true gentleman; how
it rushes upon him that he himself is only a humbug! How the poor
fellow's heart sinks!

Turning from such inferior fields of ambition as these, I think
how often it happens that men come to some sphere in life with
a flourish of trumpets, as destined to do great things, and then
fail. There is a modest, quiet self-confidence, without which
you will hardly get on in this world; but I believe, as a general
rule, that the men who have attained to very great success have
started with very moderate expectations. Their first aim was lowly;
and the way gradually opened before them. Their ambition, like
their success, went on step by step; they did not go at the top of
the tree at once. It would be easy to mention instances in which
those who started with high pretensions have been taught by stern
fact to moderate them; in which the man who came over from the
Irish bar intending to lead the Queen's Bench, and become a Chief
Justice, was glad, after thirty years of disappointment, to get
made a County Court judge. Not that this is always so; sometimes
pretension, if big enough, secures success. A man setting up as a
silk-mercer in a strange town, is much likelier to succeed if he
opens a huge shop, painted in flaring colours and puffed by enormous