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, whe 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

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. 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

To escape from the miseries of ennui,

"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 Barton; "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

naturally active minds, whose "quick thoughts like lightning are alive," are the first to feel the pernicious effects of indolence. How many such, cursed with too much leisure, take too much of something else to make their gloom deeper and their misfortunes more! An old divine says truly that the human heart is like a millstone; if you put wheat under it, it grinds the wheat into flour; if you put no wheat, it grinds on, but then 't is itself it wears away. Colton observes that ennui has made more gamblers than avarice, more drunkards than thirst, and more suicides than despair. Muley Ismail, a famous tyrant, always employed his troops in some active and useful. work when not engaged in war, to keep them, he said, "from being devoured by the worm of indolence." Count de Caylus, a French nobleman, being born to wealth and princely idleness, turned his attention to engraving, and made many fine copies of antique gems. "I engrave," said he, "that I may not hang myself." Old Dumbiedikes wisely charged his son to be "aye sticking in a tree when he had nothing else to do "; and in the same vein is the advice of an Elizabethan poet :

"Eschew the idle vein,

Flee, flee from doing naught!
For never was there idle brain
But bred an idle thought."

It is not easy, however, for a young man to realize this; and hence the time when they shall leave their father's house, and minister with their own hands to their necessities, is looked forward to by many with dislike and dread. Yet it will come, and it is highly important that he who would make the most of life should lose no time in indecision, but promptly determine to what calling he will give his energies.

The Latin poet, Horace, advises authors, in choosing a subject to write upon, to select one just equal to their strength, and to ponder long and deeply what their shoulders will bear. Equally essential is it to worldly success in general, that one should choose a calling to which his abilities are fitted. With