xisting state of facts. He did not much expect that things would
turn out as he wished them. Yes: there is nothing like the habit of
being disappointed, to make a man resigned when disappointment comes,
and to enable him to take it quietly. And a habit of practical
resignation grows upon most men, as they advance through life.

You have often seen a poor beggar, most probably an old man, with some
lingering remains of respectability in his faded appearance, half ask
an alms of a passer-by; and you have seen him, at a word of repulse, or
even on finding no notice taken of his request, meekly turn away: too
beaten and sick at heart for energy; drilled into a dreary resignation
by the long custom of finding everything go against him in this world.
You may have known a poor cripple, who sits all day by the side of the
pavement of a certain street, with a little bundle of tracts in his
hand, watching those who pass by, in the hope that they may give him
something. I wonder, indeed, how the police suffer him to be there: for,
though ostensibly selling the tracts, he is really begging. Hundreds of
times in the long day, he must see people approaching, and hope that
they may spare him a halfpenny, and find ninety-nine out of each hundred
pass without noticing him. It must be a hard school of Resignation.
Disappointments without number have subdued that poor creature into
bearing one disappointment more with scarce an appreciable stir of
heart. But, on the other hand, kings, great nobles, and the like, have
been known, even to the close of life, to violently curse and swear, if
things went against them; going the length of stamping and blaspheming
even at rain and wind, and branches of trees and plashes of mud, which
were of course guiltless of any design of giving offence to these
eminent individuals. There was a great monarch, who, when any little
cross-accident befell him, was wont to fling himself upon the floor, and
there to kick and scream and tear his hair. And around him, meanwhile,
stood his awe-stricken attendants: all doubtless ready to assure
him that there was something noble and graceful in his kicking and
screaming, and that no human being had ever before with such dignity
and magnanimity torn his hair. My friend Mr. Smith tells me that in his
early youth he had a (very slight) acquaintance with a great prince, of
elevated rank and of vast estates. That great prince came very early to
his greatness; and no one had