A kindly consideration for others is the best method in the world to
adopt, to ease off our own troubles; and this consideration is to be
cultivated very easily. There is not one of those who will take up this
book who is perfectly happy, and not one who does not fancy that he or
she might be very much better off. Perhaps ten out of every dozen have
been disappointed in life. They are not precisely what they should be.
The wise poor man, in spite of his wisdom, envies the rich fool; and the
fool--if he has any appreciation--envies the wisdom of the other. One is
too tall, the other is too short; ill-health plagues a third, and a bad
wife a fourth; and so on. Yet there is not one of the sorrows or
troubles that we have but might be reasoned away. The short man can not
add a cubit to his stature; but he may think, after all, that many great
heroes have been short, and that it is the mind, not the form, that
makes the man. Napoleon the Great, who had high-heeled boots, and was,
to be sure, hardly a giant in stature, once looked at a picture of
Alexander, by David. "Ah!" said he, taking snuff, with a pleased air,
"Alexander was shorter than I." The hero last mentioned is he who cried
because he had no more worlds to conquer, and who never thought of
conquering himself. But if Alexander were disappointed about another
world, his courtiers were much more so because they were not Alexanders.
But the world would not have cared for a surplus of them; one was
enough.
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