loses his magic talisman and with it his luck, is plucked of his fortune, and obliged to fly to the Continent. The experience of a character in one of Cumberland's plays hardly burlesques an actual truth. "It is not upon slight grounds," says he, "that I despair. I have tried each walk, and am likely to starve at last. There is not a point to which the art and faculty of man can turn, that I have not set mine to, but in vain. I am beat through every quarter of the compass. I have blustered for prerogative; I have bellowed for freedom; I have offered to serve my country; I have engaged to betray it. Why, I have talked treason, writ treason; and if a man can't live by that, he can't live by anything. Here I set up as a bookseller, and people immediately leave off reading. If I were to turn butcher, I believe, o' my conscience, they 'd leave off eating." On the other hand, the crazy-headed Lord Timothy Dexter sends a cargo of warming-pans to the West Indies, and lo! while everybody is laughing at him, it proves a brilliant adventure.

A writer in the Edinburgh Review, in speaking of success at the bar, says, with much truth, that, when there is not legal business enough for all the profession, some must starve. An overstocked profession is like a crew trying to save themselves upon a raft scarcely large enough to carry half of them; or like the inmates of the Black Hole at Calcutta, where all who could not get near the aperture in the wall were suffocated, the survivors owing their safety as much to position and selfishness as to strength. Erskine once declared in Parliament that success oftener depended upon accident and certain physical advantages, than upon the most brilliant talent and the most profound erudition. A high-spirited and popular leader lately illustrated the matter thus: "When I look round upon my competitors, and consider my own qualifications, the wonder to me is, how I ever got the place I now occupy. I can only account for it by comparing the forensic career to one of the crossings in our great thoroughfares. You arrive just when it is clear, and get over at once; another finds it blocked up, is

kept waiting, and arrives too late at his destination, though the better pedestrian of the two."

So powerfully does fortune appear to sway the destinies of men, putting a silver spoon into one man's mouth, and a wooden one into another's, that some of the most sagacious of men, as Cardinal Mazarin and Rothschild, seem to have been inclined to regard luck as the first element of worldly success; experience, sagacity, energy, and enterprise as nothing, if linked to an unlucky star. Whittington, and his cat that proved such a source of riches; the man who, worn out by a painful disorder, attempted suicide, and was cured by opening an internal imposthume; the Persian, condemned to lose his tongue, on whom the operation was so bunglingly performed. that it merely removed an impediment in his speech; the painter who produced an effect he had long toiled after in vain, by throwing his brush at the picture in a fit of rage and despair; the musical composer, who, having exhausted his patience in attempts to imitate on the piano a storm at sea, accomplished the precise result by angrily extending his hands. to the two extremities of the keys, and bringing them rapidly together, - all these seem to many fit types of the freaks of Fortune by which some men are enriched or made famous by their blunders, while others, with ten times the capacity and knowledge, are kept at the bottom of her wheel. Hence we see thousands fold their arms and look with indifference on the great play of life, keeping aloof from its finest and therefore most arduous struggles, because they believe that success is a matter of accident, and that they may spend their heart's choicest blood and affection on noble ends, yet be balked of victory, cheated of any just returns.

There is one curious fact noticeable in regard to this thing called "luck," which is, that while it is made responsible for any turn of affairs that we feel to be discreditable to us, it rarely has credit for an opposite state of things; but, like most other faithful allies in victory, comes poorly off. Every good deed we do, every triumph we achieve, either in the battle

field of the world or of our own hearts, is due to ourselves alone. Stoutly as we may affirm that our disasters and vices are chargeable to luck, we never dream of ascribing our meritorious deeds, in the slightest degree, to its agency. In such cases we quite unconsciously blink out of sight the magic power of the latter principle, so wondrous and all-controlling in its influence at other times, and coolly appropriate to ourselves not merely the lion's share, but the whole glory of our position. We would, in fact, persuade the world, that, throughout, all the circumstances were actually against us, but that by our own stern resolve and heroic energy we crushed our way through them. In cases like this, we act very much like the English sailor in Joe Miller. Falling from the ship's topmast upon deck without injury, he instantly jumped up, and, springing to the side of the vessel, called out to the crew of a Dutch vessel near by, one of whom had performed some wonderful feats in leaping, "Can any of you lubbers do anything like that?"

Man is, to a considEstimate as highly as

The sum of the whole matter is this. erable extent, the child of opportunity. we may the power of the individual in the achievement of success, there is yet another factor in the product, the power of circumstances, which we cannot wholly ignore. It has been remarked that the same tree that is soft and spongy in a fat swamp, with its heavy air, grows hard and noble on the hillside. Spitzbergen forests are breast high, and Nova Scotia hemlocks mourn their cold wet sky in long weird shrouds of white moss. As the acute French writer, M. Taine, says: "Nature, being a sower of men, and constantly putting her hand in the same sack, distributes over the soil regularly and in turn about the same proportionate quantity and quality of seed. But in the handfuls she scatters as she strides over time and space, not all germinate. A certain moral temperature is necessary to develop certain talents; if this is wanting, these prove abortive. Consequently, as the temperature changes, so will the species of talent change; if it turn in an opposite

direction, talent follows; so that, in general, we may conceive moral temperature as making a selection among different species of talent, allowing only this or that species to develop itself, to the more or less complete exclusion of others."

Gray's musings on the Cromwells and Miltons of the village only exaggerate a real truth. There are times in every man's life when, if he were a pagan, he would incline to believe that his career is directed by an ironical fate which finds a certain pleasure in mocking his best plans and most strenuous efforts by an unexpected reverse; when, finding himself baffled at every turn, he sits down in despair and says to himself, "It is useless to struggle in the meshes in which I am entangled; all things have conspired against me; I can never extricate myself, and the sooner I cease to fight against destiny the better." The ancients fully believed in destiny. "Some people," says Pliny, "refer their successes to virtue and ability; but it is all fate." Alexander depended much upon his luck, and Plutarch tells us that Sulla was so lucky that the surname of "Fortunate" was given him. Cicero speaks of the luck of Fabius Maximus, Marcellus, Scipio, and Marius as a settled thing. "It was not only their courage," he says, "but their fortune, which induced the people to intrust them with the command of their armies. For there can be little doubt but that, besides their great abilities, there was a certain Fortune appointed to attend upon them, and to conduct them to honor and renown, and to uncommon success in the management of important affairs." Cæsar believed in his own good luck, and told the pilot in the storm, Cæsarem portas et fortunam ejus, "You carry Cæsar and his good fortune." Some of the greatest modern generals have agreed with Bacon that "outward accidents conduce much to fortune." Marlborough, who planned his battles so carefully, talked more than once about his destiny. Cromwell had his lucky days, of which his birthday, when he gained two great battles, was one; and Nelson had his white days and his black ones.

When we see Mahomet flying from his enemies, saved by

a spider's web; when we think that a Whig Ministry was hurled from power in England by the spilling of some water on a lady's gown; when we find a Franklin ascribing his turn of thought and conduct through life to the accident of a tattered copy of Cotton Mather's "Essays to do Good" falling into his hands, and Jeremy Bentham attributing similar effects to a single phrase, "The greatest good of the greatest number," that caught his eye at the end of a pamphlet; when we see a Bruce pass through a series of perils greater than any which the most daring romance-writer or melodramatist ever imagined for his hero, and then perish from a fall in handing a lady down stairs after dinner, and a Speke accidentally shoot himself in England, after escaping innumerable dangers in penetrating to the furtive and reedy fountains of the Nile; when we find that one man may suck an orange and be choked by a pit, another swallow a penknife and live; one run a thorn into his hand and die, in spite of the utmost efforts of medical skill, another recover, after a shaft of a gig has run completely through his body, we cannot help believing, with Solomon, who, doubtless, had himself witnessed many such grim antitheses of life and death, that time and chance happen to all men, and that circumstances have much to do with every man's career in life. "We talk of life as a journey," says Sydney Smith, "but how variously is that journey performed! There are those who come forth girt, and shod, and mantled, to walk on velvet lawns and smooth terraces, where every gale is arrested and every beam is tempered. There are others who walk on the Alpine paths of life, against driving misery, and through stormy sorrows, over sharp afflictions; walk with bare feet and naked breast, jaded, mangled, and chilled."

The degree in which fame one of the prizes of life for which men struggle is dependent on accident, sometimes the result even of ill-luck, is strikingly illustrated by the fate of Sir John Moore. "He had fought," says a writer in the Dublin University Magazine, "as other generals had, had his successes as well as his reverses, and had just kept his head