he
melancholy docket, "_Learning thrown away_"; and charming professors of
poetry--as though the alto should insist on singing the basso
part--impressively assure him how dreadfully uneasy they are about the
weakness of our army, and how horribly low upon the security of our Indian
Empire.

(M169) Some have said that to peruse the papers of a prime minister must
lower one's view of human nature. Perhaps this may partly depend upon the
prime minister, partly on the height of our expectations from our
fellow-creatures. If such a survey is in any degree depressing, there can
be no reason why it should be more so than any other large inspection of
human life. In the Octagon as in any similar repository we come upon
plenty of baffled hopes, chagrin in finding a career really ended, absurd
over-estimates of self, over-estimates of the good chances of the world,
vexation of those who have chosen the wrong path at the unfair good luck
of those who have chosen the right. We may smile, but surely in
good-natured sympathy, at the zeal of poor ladies for a post for husbands
of unrecognised merit, or at the importunity of younger sons with large
families but inadequate means. Harmless things of this sort need not turn
us into satirists or cynics.

All the riddles of the great public world are there--why one man becomes
prime minister, while another who ran him close at school and college ends
with a pension from the civil list; why the same stable and same pedigree
produce a Derby winner and the poor cab-hack; why one falls back almost
from the start, while another runs famously until the corner, and then his
vaulting ambition dwindles to any place of "moderate work and decent
emolument"; how new competitors swim into the field of vision; how suns
rise and set with no return, and vanish as if they had never been suns but
only ghosts or bubbles; how in these time-worn papers, successive
generations of active men run chequered courses, group following group,
names blazing into the fame of a day, then like the spangles of a rocket
expiring. Men write accepting posts, all excitement, full of hope and
assurance of good work, and then we remember how quickly clouds came and
the office ended in failure and torment. In the next pigeon-hole just in
the same way is the radiant author's gift of his book that after all fell
still-born. One need not be prime minister to know the eternal tale of the
vanity of human wishes, or how men move,