clothes, longer beds, and bigger hats than they.
When Tom, Dick, and Harry, annoyed at these
exactions, find that the small son of Anak is not
so very much taller than themselves, cut him up
in reviews or snub him in society, great is the
vexation of spirit he endures. But your real
giant, who never thinks of Tom, Dick, and
Harry at all, takes the matter quite calmly:
whatever be his own altitude, he sees before
him an ideal far higher than himself, and ten
times higher than anything they see, and this
keeps him at once very humble in his own
opinion, and very indifferent to theirs. The
present essayist, though decidedly not a man of
genius, has known a good many such, and has
always found them neither strutting like
peacocks nor marching on stilts, but moving about
as mild and tame as the elephant in the
Zoological Gardens, and as apparently unconscious
of their own magnitude. It is your second-rate,
your merely clever man, who, ape-like, is always
rattling at the bars of his cage, mopping and
mowing to attract attention, and eagerly holding
out his paw for the nuts and apples of public
appreciation, which, if he does not get— why, he
sits and howls!

Such people have rarely suffered any dire
calamity or heart-deep blow. To have sat down
with sorrow — real sorrow — more often gives a
steadiness and balance to the whole character,
and leaves behind a permanent consistent
cheerfulness, more touching, and oh! how infinitely
more blessed, than the mirth of those who have
never known grief. Also, after deep anguish
comes a readiness to seize upon, make the best
of, and enjoy to the uttermost, every passing
pleasure: for the man who has once known
famine will never waste even a crumb again.
Rather will he look with compassionate wonder
at the many who scatter recklessly their daily
bread of comfort and peace; who turn disgusted
from a simple breakfast because they are looking
forwards to a possible sumptuous dinner; or
throw away contemptuously their wholesome
crust, because they see, with envious eyes, their
opposite neighbour feeding on plum-cake.

No, the miserable people whom one meets are
not the really unhappy ones, or rather those
who have actual misfortune to bear, there being
a wide distinction between misfortune and
unhappiness. How often do we see moving in
society, carrying everywhere a pleasant face,
and troubling no one with their secret care,
those whom we know are burdened with an inevitable
incommunicable grief: an insane wife,
a dissipated husband, tyrannical parents, or
ungrateful children? Yet they say nothing about
it, this skeleton in the cupboard, which their
neighbours all know of or guess at, but upon
which they themselves quietly turn the key, and
go on their way; uncomplaining, and thankful to
be spared complaining. What good will it do
them to moan? It is not they, the unfortunate
men, nor yet the men of genius, who contrive to
make miserable their own lives and those of
everybody connected with them. The true
misery-mongers are a very different race; you
may find the key to their mystery in Milton's
famous axiom,

    Fall'n cherub, to be weak is miserable,
    Doing or suffering.

There, for once, the devil spoke truth.
Miserable people are invariably weak people.

    O well for him whose will is strong,
    He suffers, but he will not suffer long;
    He suffers, but he cannot suffer wrong.

Of course not, because his firm will must in
time shake off any suffering; and because no
amount of externally inflicted evil is to be
compared to the evil which a man inflicts upon
himself; by feebleness of purpose, by cowardly
non-resistance to oppression, and by a general
uncertainty of aims or acts. He who sees the right
and cannot follow it; who loves all things noble,
yet dare not fight against things ignoble in
himself or others; who is haunted by a high
ideal of what he wishes to be, yet is for ever
falling short of it, and tortured by the
consciousness that he does fall short of it, and that
his friends are judging him, not unjustly, by
what he is rather than by what he vainly aims
at being—this man is, necessarily, one of the
unhappiest creatures living. One of the most
harmful too, since you can be on your guard
against the downright villain, but the æsthetic
evil-doer, the theoretically good and practically
bad man, who has lofty aspirations without
performances, virtuous impulses and no persistence
—against such an one you have no weapons to
use. He disarms your resentment by exciting
your pity; is for ever crying " Quarter,
quarter!" and, though you feel that he deserves
none, that his weakness has injured yourself and
others as much as any wickedness, still, out of
pure compassion, you sheathe your righteous
sword and let him escape unpunished. Up he
rises, fresh as ever, and pursues his course,
always sinning and always repenting, yet claiming
to be judged not by the sin but the
penitence; continually and obstinately miserable,
yet blind to the fact that half his misery is
caused by himself alone.

And this brings us to the other root of
misery-mongering—selfishness. None but a
thoroughly selfish person can be always
unhappy. Life is so equally balanced that there
is always as much to rejoice as to weep over, if
we are only able — and willing — to rejoice in
and for and through others.

      Time and the hour run through the roughest day—

if we will but let it be so—if we will allow our
sky to clear and our wounds to heal — believing
in the wonderfully reparative powers of Nature
when she is given free play. But these poor
souls will not give her free play; they prefer
to indulge in their griefs, refusing obstinately
all remedies, till they bring on a chronic dyspepsia
of the soul, which is often combined with a
corresponding disease of the body.

It may seem a dreadful doctrine to poetical
people, but two-thirds of a man's woes usually
begin—in his stomach. Irregular feeding, walking