did Baron Munchausen, who, being once threatened at the same moment by a crocodile and a tiger, disposed of both his assailants by stepping aside and allowing the tiger to jump down the crocodile's throat. It is not enough, after the game has flown, that we might have brought it down, if our guns had been cocked and loaded. "What a scathing reply I might have made to Smith about Darwinism!' is the regretful reflection of Jones, as he retires heated and discomfited from a contest with Smith on the subject of natural selection. What capital things we might say and don't! . . . . When we are alone, we invent the happiest of retorts; the most unanswerable arguments flash upon us without an effort on our part; we feel that we have more weapons in our mental armory than Brown ever dreamed of; yet, somehow, when Brown attacks us suddenly, we cannot bring our twelve-pounder to bear upon him before he has shot us through and through with his ready little revolver. We of the superior metal find ourselves spiked, so to speak. The fact is, we lack readiness."

It was so, if we may credit Fuller, with Ben Jonson in his "wit-combats with Shakespeare. The two were "like a Spanish great galleon and an English man-of-war. Master Jonson, like the former, was built far higher in learning; solid, but slow in his performances. Shakespeare, with the English man-of-war, lesser in bulk but lighter in sailing, could turn with all tides, tack about, and take advantages of all winds, by the quickness of his wit and invention."

A powerful encouragement to the formation of business. habits is found in the fact that, once formed, they operate spontaneously. The wonderful accuracy of the forest-bred Indian in detecting and describing the number and character of a party who have preceded him through the woods, and the certainty with which he will determine the time since they left any particular spot, have often astonished white men, who could perceive no signs upon which to found an opinion. Yet the red man rarely blunders, for he has schooled his senses into unerring habits of nice and accurate observation. But, because it is a habit, he is not obliged to force his mind; it is

his pleasure, and forms one of the charms of forest life, to watch every indented leaf, every faint footprint, every minute and barely perceptible sign that some one has gone before him. So when a merchant has acquired the habit of watching the markets, studying the laws of demand and supply, ascertaining the probability of a financial crisis, and looking after all the other details of his business, it becomes a pleasurable excitement instead of a wearisome effort. Indeed, the very habits of nice order. and observation which require the most painstaking care to form them, often become a hobby, at last, which one delights to ride as much as a child his rocking-horse. It is notorious that those persons who have reached the highest eminence in the law were disgusted with it at first. Lord Somers told Addison that, having been obliged to search among old musty records, the task which was inexpressibly irksome at first became at last so very pleasant that he preferred it to reading Virgil or Cicero, though classical literature had been his constant delight.

To sum up all, what is business but habit, the soul of which is regularity? Like the fly-wheel upon a steam-engine, it is this principle which keeps the motion of life steady and unbroken, distributing the force equally over all the work to be performed. But such habits as we have commended are not to be formed in a day, nor by a few faint resolutions. Not by accident, not by fits and starts, being one moment in a paroxysm of attention, and the next falling into the sleep of indifference, are they to be attained, but by steady, persistent effort. Above all, it is necessary that they should be acquired in youth; for then do they cost the least effort. Like letters cut in the bark of a tree, they grow and widen with age. Once attained, they are a fortune of themselves; for their possessor has disposed thereby of the heavy end of the load of life; all that remains he can carry easily and pleasantly. On the other hand, bad habits, once formed, will hang forever on the wheels of enterprise, and in the end will assert their supremacy, to the ruin and shame of their victim.

CHAPTER XIII.

SELF-ADVERTISING.

The pious and just honoring of ourselves may be thought the radical moisture and fountain-head from whence every laudable and worthy enterprise issues forth. - MILTON.

I know that I am censured of some conceit of my ability or worth; but I pray your Majesty impute it to my desire, possunt quia posse videntur. LORD BACON to JAMES I.

Although men are accused for not knowing their own weakness, yet perhaps as few know their own strength. It is in men as in soils, where sometimes there is a vein of gold which the owner knows not of. - SWIFT. On ne vaut que ce qu'on veut valoir. - LA BRUYÈRE.

SHAL

HALL a man be his own trumpeter? or, relying on his merits, shall he aim to be rather than to seem qualified for his business, and leave the world to find out the fact for itself? This is a question which confronts every man at the very outset of his career. How the world has answered it we need not say. The mythologists tell us that Minerva threw away the flute when she found that it puffed up her cheeks; but if in this age men cast away the flute, it is to use a more potent instrument of puffing, by blowing their own trumpets. This instrument, it is almost universally agreed, should be of brass. Not only in trade, but in all the professions, self-trumpeting is now acknowledged to be the great talisman of success, and the man who can blow his horn the longest and loudest is regarded as the most likely to reach the pinnacle of riches and respectability, if not of honor.

The old-fashioned modes of securing patronage or custom, by strict integrity and quiet attention to one's business, are scouted on all hands. Merit is voted "a slow coach," and modesty a humbug. A writer in one of our most popular magazines goes so far as to assert that a tinge of charlatanism

seems, indeed, almost necessary to a career, whether in business, literature, art, or science. "A little unscrupulousness," he adds, "generally flavors the finest achievements. Nature insists, apparently, that the best of us shall use some contrivance, and will permit nobody to neglect it entirely, without suffering penalties." Acting upon this doctrine, an enterprising tradesman, whose business chances to be hat-making, never dreams of setting himself diligently to make better hats than another, that so the heads of the human race may be more honorably covered; but he sets up an enormous lath-andplaster hat on wheels, and sends it circulating through the streets with the speculative hope of persuading us into a conviction of his superiority, and thereby gaining an influx of He outbids the world for its patronage by the boldness of his proclamations, and expects to succeed by the very extravagance of his pretensions. A man who has music neither in his soul nor in his larynx, and whose voice, when he attempts to sing, reminds you of Milton's infernal gates, "grating harsh thunder," would have you believe him a fine vocalist; and so, instead of ravishing your ears with

custom.

"Many a winding bout

Of linked sweetness long drawn out,"

he resorts to the "dodge " of paying six hundred dollars for aseat at Jenny Lind's first concert in America. Gullibility, in short, is deemed the surest avenue to success, and hence human ingenuity is evermore racked and tortured for new means of attracting and securing attention, the results of which everywhere confront us, on the walls of buildings, in endless circulars, in newspaper advertisements, in boys at streetcorners thrusting mysterious slips of paper into our hands, in huge placards borne on men's shoulders, and in the lumbering caravans with ear-stunning bands of music which obstruct the thoroughfares of our large cities. Blow your own trumpet is the advice of every one, if you do not wish to be trampled under foot in the rush of competitive strife, and die in ob

scurity. Sound your charge, and ride over somebody, or somebody will sound his charge, and ride over you.

Now and then you meet with a simple-minded man who gives all his soul to doing his work well. But this, the worldly wise will tell you, is an egregious mistake. Such a mode of procedure might do in Mars or Saturn, but is totally out of place in this puffing, advertising, bill-sticking part of creation. The art of self-advancement is not so much to do a thing well, as to get a thing which has been moderately well done largely talked about. The works of a De Quincey, without newspaper puffing, would find purchasers only among pastry-cooks and barbers; while the sensational novel of the Monk Lewis or Ainsworth school, whose name stares out upon you in Gothic capitals from newspapers and posters, sells as well as Jayne's Expectorant, and the platitudes of Martin F. Tupper are as popular as Mustang Liniment.

Now that this policy, however sharply it may be censured by the moralist, is more conducive to success than its opposite, cannot, we think, be doubted. Travellers in Oriental countries tell us that to him who would be respected there a certain air of conscious importance is indispensable. The Orientals, they say, have no notion that it can "pay" to respect a man who does not respect himself; and therefore if a Pacha of two tails does you the honor of a visit, you must demean yourself as if you were a Pacha of three. But does not the same rule hold good all the world over?

How often do we see families taking a high rank in the social scale, without any adventitious circumstances to back their pretensions, simply because they set a high value upon themselves, and discourage all intimacies except from aristocratic quarters! How often, too, do we see the reverse exemplified in families that have every factitious advantage, but which never rise in the social scale, because they never stickle on the score of dignity, and are ready to receive advances from all persons, even the humblest and most plebeian! So the modest maiden links herself to some shallow coxcomb, who is