to look back on the fancies of youth, which experience has sobered
down. When you go back, my reader, to the village where you were
brought up, don't you remember how you used to fancy that when you
were a man you would come to it in your carriage and four? This, it
is unnecessary to add, you have not yet done. You thought likewise
that when you came back you would be arrayed in a scarlet coat,
possibly in a cuirass of steel; whereas in fact you have come to
the little inn where nobody knows you to spend the night, and you
are wandering along the bank of the river (how little changed!) in
a shooting-jacket of shepherd's plaid. You intended to marry the
village grocer's pretty daughter; and for that intention probably
you were somewhat hastily dismissed to a school a hundred miles
off; but this evening as you passed the shop you discovered her,
a plump matron, calling to her children in a voice rather shrill
than sweet; and you discovered from the altered sign above the
door that her father is dead, and that she has married the shopman,
your hated rival of former years. And yet how happily the wind is
tempered to the shorn lamb! You are not the least mortified. You
are much amused that your youthful fancies have been blighted. It
would have been fearful to have married that excellent individual;
the shooting-jacket is greatly more comfortable than the coat
of mail; and as for the carriage and four, why, even if you could
afford them, you would seldom choose to drive four horses. And it
is so with the more substantial anticipations of maturer years.
The man who, as already mentioned, intended to be a Chief Justice,
is quite happy when he is made a County Court judge. The man who
intended to eclipse Mr. Dickens in the arts of popular authorship
is content and proud to be the great writer of the London Journal.
The clergyman who would have liked a grand cathedral like York Minster
is perfectly pleased with his little country church, ivy-green and