The uncongeniality of a profession into which a man may have been forced by the injudicious overruling of his friends, or by the exigencies of family position and inherited rights, is one form of the pinching shoe by no means rare to find. And here, again, poor royalty comes in for a share of the grip on tender places, and the consequent hobbling of its feet. For many an hereditary king was meant by nature to be nothing but a plain country gentleman at the best--perhaps even less; many, like poor 'Louis Capet,' would have gone to the end quite happily and respectably if only they might have kicked off the embroidered shoes of sovereignty and betaken themselves to the highlows of the herd--if only they might have exchanged the sceptre for the turning-lathe, the pen or the fowling-piece. 'Je déteste mon métier de roi,' Victor Emmanuel is reported to have said to a republican friend who sympathized with the monarch's well-known tastes in other things beside his hatred of the kingly profession; and history repeats this frank avowal in every page. But the purple is as hard to be got rid of as Deianeira's robe; for the most part carrying the skin along with it and trailed through a pool of blood in the act of transfer--which is scarcely what royalty, oppressed with its own greatness, and willing to rid itself of sceptre and shoes that it may enjoy itself in list-slippers after a more bourgeoise fashion, would find in accordance with its wishes. Lower down in the social scale we find the same kind of misfit between nature and position as a very frequent occurrence--pinching shoes, productive of innumerable corns and tender places, being many where the feet represent the temperament and the shoes are the profession. How often we see a natural 'heavy' securely swathed in cassock and bands, and set up in the pulpit of the family church, simply because the tithes were large and the advowson was part of the family inheritance. But that stiff rectorial shoe of his will never wear easy. The man's secret soul goes out to the parade-ground and the mess-table. The glitter and jingle and theatrical display of a soldier's life seem to him the finest things in the whole round of professions, and the quiet uneventful life of a village pastor is of all the most abhorrent. He wants to act, not to teach. Yet there he is, penned in beyond all power of breaking loose on this side the grave; bound to drone out muddled sermons half an hour long and eminently good for sleeping draughts, instead of shouting terse and stirring words of command which set the blood on fire to hear; bound to rout the shadowy enemy of souls with weapons he can neither feel nor use, instead of prancing off at the head of his men, waving his drawn sword above his head in a whirlwind of excitement and martial glory, to rout the tangible enemies of his country's flag. He loves his wife and takes a mild parsonic pleasure in his roses; he