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wing. It is not enough, however, to seize opportunity when it comes. We must not be content with waiting for something to turn up"; we must try to make something turn up. "We must not only strike the iron while it is hot, but strike it till it is made hot."

It is a popular idea that great inventions are the result of what is called "lucky hits," that chance has more to do with them than head-work. It is true that the very greatest inventions are the simplest, and that the truths on which they are founded seem obvious. But familiar and commonplace as they may appear, we must remember that the veil, flimsy and transparent as it may now seem when a school-boy's hand can lift it, was yet sufficient to conceal these truths for centuries. As Professor Whewell has truly said, "No man who fairly considers the real nature of great discoveries, and the intellectual processes which they involve, can seriously hold the opinion of their being the effect of accident. Such accidents never happen to common men. Thousands of men, even the most inquiring and speculative, had seen bodies fall; but who, except Newton, ever followed the accident to such consequences?" Buffon, another competent authority, tells us that invention, so far from being accidental, depends on patience. "Contemplate your subject long. It will gradually unfold itself, till a sort of electric spark convulses the brain for a moment, and sends a glow of irritation to the heart. Then comes

the luxury of genius."

Cardinal Richelieu was not glaringly wrong, therefore, in the opinion that an unfortunate and an imprudent person are synonymous terms. Every man is placed, in some degree, under the influence of events and of other men; but it is for himself to decide whether he will rule, or be ruled by them. They may operate powerfully against him at times; but rarely so as to overwhelm him, if he bears up manfully, and with a stout, dogged will. In the battle of life we may be drawn as conscripts, but our courage or our cowardice, our gentleness or our cruelty, depends upon ourselves. "The Admiralty," wrote

Nelson, when expecting to command the finest fleet in the world, "may order me a cock-boat, but I will do my duty." It is now admitted that the English were not lucky in the Russian war, simply because they hesitated. A gunboat with a will behind it, according to high military authority, would at one time have settled the matter; England had a fleet, but not a will. "In one respect," said the French Admiral Coligni, "I may claim superiority over Alexander, over Scipio, over Cæsar. They won great battles, it is true; I have lost four great battles, and yet I show to the enemy a more formidable front than ever." The man who shows this spirit will triumph over fortune in the end. Like cork, he may be submerged for a while, but he cannot be kept down. De Quincey justly remarks of Cæsar, that the superb character of his intellect throws a colossal shadow, as of predestination, over the most trivial incidents of his career. But it was simply through the perfection of his preparations, arrayed against all conceivable contingencies, and which make him appear like some incarnate providence, veiled in a human form, ranging through the ranks of the legions, that he was enabled to triumph over Pompey, whom Cicero had pronounced "the semper felix," always lucky, when he recommended him to the Roman Senate as the best man to crush the pirates.

No doubt that, as Byron said, sometimes

"Men are the sport of circumstances, when

The circumstances seem the sport of men."

Favor, opportunity, the death of others, and occasion fitting virtue," have often been, as Bacon says, stepping-stones to success. Sulla thought it better to be lucky than great. Really "lucky fellows" there have always been in the world; but in a great majority of cases they who are called such will be found on examination to be those keen-sighted men who have surveyed the world with a scrutinizing eye, and who to clear and exact ideas of what is necessary to be done unite the skill necessary to execute their well-approved plans. If now and then a crazy-headed man, as in the instance already mentioned, sends

a cargo of warming-pans to the West Indies, which, while everybody is laughing at his folly, proves a brilliant venture, the very fact that such a freak of fortune excites remark proves its infrequency. It is an interesting fact that Wellington, who never lost a battle, never spoke of luck, though no man guarded more carefully against all possible accidents, or was prompter to turn to account the ill-fortune of an adversary. Napoleon, on the other hand, believed in his star. He was the Man of Destiny, the picked, the chosen. "People talk of my crimes," said he; "but men of my mark do not commit crimes. What I did was a necessity; I was the child of destiny!" But who can doubt that it was for that very reason, that, when once the tide of fortune turned against him, a few years of trouble sufficed to kill him, where such a man as Wellington would have melted St. Helena rather than have given up the ghost with a full stomach?

Let no one, then, repine because the fates are sometimes against him, but, when he trips or falls, let him, like Cæsar when he stumbled on the shore, stumble forward, and, by escaping the omen, change its nature and meaning. Remembering that those very circumstances which are apt to be abused as the palliative of failure are the true test of merit, let him gird up his loins for whatever in the mysterious economy of the world may await him. Thus will he gradually rise superior to ill-fortune, and, becoming daily more and more impassive to its attacks, will learn to force his way in spite of it, till at last he will be able to fashion his luck to his will. "Life is too short," says a shrewd thinker, "for us to waste its moments in deploring bad luck; we must go after success, since it will not come to us, and we have no time to spare."

CHAPTER III.

CHOICE OF A PROFESSION.

It is an uncontroverted truth, that no man ever made an ill-figure who understood his own talents, nor a good one who mistook them. - SWIFT. The crowning fortune of a man is to be born with a bias to some pursuit, which finds him in employment and happiness. - R. W. EMERSON.

Be what nature intended you for, and you will succeed; be anything else, and you will be ten thousand times worse than nothing. - SYDNEY SMITH.

I cannot repeat too often that no man struggles perpetually and victoriously against his own character; and one of the first principles of success in life is so to regulate our career as rather to turn our physical constitution and natural inclinations to good account, than to endeavor to counteract the one or oppose the other. - SIR H. L. BULWER.

T is almost a truism to say that the first thing to be done by him who would succeed in life is to make a wise choice of

T

a profession. Of the thousands of men who are continually coming upon the stage of life, there are few who escape the necessity of adopting some profession or calling; and there are fewer still who, if they knew the miseries of idleness, tenfold keener and more numerous than those of the most laborious profession, would ever desire such an escape. In this age of intense activity, when hundreds of men in every community are killing themselves by overwork, it is hardly necessary to show that there can be no genuine happiness without labor. All sensible men admit, and none more readily than those who have tried the experiment of killing time in a round of amusements, that the happiest life is made up of alternations of toil and leisure, of work and play. So necessary is labor of some kind to make existence tolerable, that those men who attempt to live a life of idleness are forced eventually to make work for themselves; they turn their very pleasures into toil, and, from mere lack of something to do, engage in the most arduous and

exhausting pastimes. To escape from the miseries of ennui, they resort to the most pitiful contrivances to cheat themselves into the illusion that they are busy. Their very amusements are encumbered by regulations, and their pleasures, which are converted into tasks, are made formal and heavy. The most trifling acts and occurrences are treated as of the gravest importance; and the rules of etiquette are enforced by the severest penalties. The man of leisure is thus transformed into the most bustling, anxious repository of little paltry cares and petty crotchets; and when the night comes, it is with a sense of relief, but very different from that of the worker, that he reflects that

"Be the day weary, or be the day long,

At length it ringeth to evensong."

It is true that not a few men kill themselves by overwork; but the proportion of such is small to the number who die from violating the laws of health; and death from excessive activity is far preferable to death from rust. The spirits may be exhausted by employment, but they are utterly destroyed by idleness. Burton, in his quaint old work, in summing up the causes of melancholy, reduces them to two, solitariness and idleness. When Charles Lamb was set free from the desk in the India Office, to which he had been chained for years, he was in an ecstasy of joy. "I would not go back to my prison," he exclaimed to a friend, "for ten years longer, for ten thousand pounds." "I am free! free as air!" he wrote to Bernard Bar

"I will live another fifty years. . . . . Positively the best thing a man can do is nothing; and next to that, perhaps, good works." Two weary years passed, and Lamb's feelings had undergone a complete revolution. He had found that leisure. though a pleasant garment to look at, is a very bad one to wear, He had found that his humdrum task, the seemingly dreary drudgery of desk-work, was a blessing in disguise. assure you," he again writes to Barton, "no work is worse than overwork; the mind preys on itself, the most unwholesome of food. I have ceased to care for almost anything." Persons of

"I