One main reason why men who have been great are disappointed, when they
retire to private life, is this: Memory makes a chief source of enjoyment
to those who cease eagerly to hope; but the memory of the great recalls
only that public life which has disgusted them. Their private life hath
slipped insensibly away, leaving faint traces of the sorrow or the joy
which found them too busy to heed the simple and quiet impressions of
mere domestic vicissitude.




SELF-GLORIFIERS.

Providence seems to have done to a certain set of persons--who always
view their own things through a magnifying medium, deem their house the
best in the world, their gun the truest, their very pointer a
miracle--as Colonel Hanger suggested to economists to do; namely, provide
their servants each with a pair of large spectacles, so that a lark might
appear as big as a fowl, and a twopenny loaf as large as a quartern.




THOUGHT ON FORTUNE.

It is often the easiest move that completes the game. Fortune is like
the lady whom a lover carried off from all his rivals by putting an
additional lace upon his liveries.