s to avoid a large
proportion of its calamities and at the same time, by preserving the
affections pure and undimmed, by diversifying interests and forming
active habits, to combat its tedium and despondency.

Another truth is that both the greatest pleasures and the keenest pains
of life lie much more in those humbler spheres which are accessible to
all than on the rare pinnacles to which only the most gifted or the most
fortunate can attain. It would probably be found upon examination that
most men who have devoted their lives successfully to great labours and
ambitions, and who have received the most splendid gifts from Fortune,
have nevertheless found their chief pleasure in things unconnected with
their main pursuits and generally within the reach of common men.
Domestic pleasures, pleasures of scenery, pleasures of reading,
pleasures of travel or of sport have been the highest enjoyment of men
of great ambition, intellect, wealth and position. There is a curious
passage in Lord Althorp's Life in which that most popular and successful
statesman, towards the close of his long parliamentary life, expressed
his emphatic conviction that 'the thing that gave him the greatest
pleasure in the world' was 'to see sporting dogs hunt.'[7] I can myself
recollect going over a country place with an old member of Parliament
who had sat in the House of Commons for nearly fifty years of the most
momentous period of modern English history. If questioned he could tell
about the stirring scenes of the great Reform Bill of 1832, but it was
curious to observe how speedily and inevitably he passed from such
matters to the history of the trees on his estate which he had planted
and watched at every stage of their growth, and how evidently in the
retrospect of life it was to these things and not to the incidents of a
long parliamentary career that his affections naturally turned. I once
asked an illustrious public man who had served his country with
brilliant success in many lands, and who was spending the evening of his
life as an active country gentleman in a place which he dearly loved,
whether he did not find this sphere too contracted for his happiness.
'Never for a day,' he answered; 'and in every country where I have been,
in every post which I have filled, the thought of this place has always
been at the back of my mind.' A great writer who had devoted almost his
whole life to one gigantic work, and to his own surprise brought it at