out going the length of Hazlitt, who affirms that, if a youth shows no aptitude for languages, but dances well, it would be better to give up ideas of scholarship for him, and hand him. over to the dancing-master, we yet deem that profession best for every man which chords most nearly with the bent of his mind, and which he can embrace without compromise of his social standing. To no other cause, perhaps, is failure in life so frequently to be traced as to a mistaken calling. A youth who might become a first-rate mechanic chances to have been born of ambitious parents, who think it more honorable for their son to handle the lancet than the chisel, and so would make him a doctor. Accordingly he is sent to college, pitchforked through a course of Latin and Greek, attends lectures, crams for an examination, gets a diploma, and, with "all his. blushing honors thick upon his vacant head," settles down to kill people scientifically, to pour, as Voltaire said, drugs of which he knows little into bodies of which he knows less, – till his incapacity is discovered, when he starves. In another case, 'a boy is forced by unwise parents to measure tape and calico, when writs and replevins are written in every lineament of his physiognomy, and Nature shows by his intellectual acumen, by his skill in hair-splitting, his adroitness at parry and thrust, his fertility of resources in every exigency, and a score of other signs, that she designed him, not to handle the yard-stick, but to thunder in the forum. Or, again, a skilful engineer is spoiled in a shoemaker, or a lad designed for a shoemaker is trained for the literary profession, reminding you of Lessing's sarcasm :-

"Tompkins forsakes his last and awl

For literary squabbles;

Styles himself poet; but his trade

Remains the same, he cobbles."

In no other calling is the proportion of failures to successes so great as in that of trade, the mercantile profession. Persons who have been at pains to collect statistics on this subject in our large towns have found that only three out of a

hundred merchants are successful; all the others becoming bankrupt, or retiring in disgust. Why is this? Is it, in every case, because they are overwhelmed by sudden disaster, which no sagacity could have anticipated or warded off? because they are dishonest, and, after long overreaching others, are overreached themselves? because, after many brilliant winnings at the gaming-table, they stake all, and lose all? because, after partial success, they expect greater, and build marble palaces, drive "two-forty" horses, and make larger investments in champagne suppers than in bonds and mortgages? Is it because Shylock cats them up with his two per cent, or because of the exploded folly in some new form of investing in eternal lottery tickets, and drawing eternal blanks? No; these causes are only the result of a more radical cause, namely, that they have gone into business without business brains. No father, as a general thing, educates his son to be a musician, without first making sure that he has a natural ear for music. But hundreds and thousands of fathers make merchants of their sons, who have no more actual fitness for trade than has a man to play at the Academy of Music who cannot distinguish a flat from a sharp, or the "Heroic Symphony" from the tune of "Old Hundred."

Above all, the notion that the "three black graces," Law, Physic, and Divinity, must be worshipped by the candidate for respectability and honor, has done incalculable damage to society. It has spoiled many a good carpenter, done injustice to the sledge and the anvil, cheated the goose and the shears out of their rights, and committed fraud on the corn and the potato field. Thousands have died of broken hearts in these professions, thousands who might have been happy at the plough, or opulent behind the counter; thousands, dispirited and hopeless, look upon the healthful and independent calling of the farmer with envy and chagrin; and thousands more, by a worse fate still, are reduced to necessities which degrade them in their own estimation, rendering the most brilliant success but a wretched compensation for the humiliation with

which it is accompanied, and compelling them to grind out of the miseries of their fellow-men the livelihood which is denied to their legitimate exertions. The result of all this is, that the world is full of men who, disgusted with their vocations, getting their living by their weakness instead of by their strength, are doomed to hopeless inferiority. "If you choose. to represent the various parts in life," says Sydney Smith, "by holes in a table of different shapes, some circular, some triangular, some square, some oblong, and the persons acting these parts by bits of wood of similar shapes, we shall generally find that the triangular person has got into the square hole, the oblong into the triangular, while the square person has squeezed himself into the round hole." A French writer on agriculture observes that it is impossible profitably to improve land by trying forcibly to change its natural character,

as by bringing sand to clay, or clay to sand. The only true method is to adapt the cultivation to the nature of the soil. So with the moral or intellectual qualities. Exhortation, selfdetermination, may do much to stimulate and prick a man on in a wrong career against his natural bent; but, when the crisis comes, this artificial character thus laboriously induced will break down, failing at the very time when it is most wanted.

The sentiment, "Our wishes are presentiments of our capabilities," is a noble maxim, of deep encouragement to all true men; and it is not more encouraging than it is true. Can anything be more reasonable than to suppose that he who, in attending to the duties of his profession, can gratify the predominant faculty, the reigning passion of the mind, who can strike

"The master-string

That makes most harmony or discord in him,"

will be, cæteris paribus, the most successful? The very fact that he has an original bias, a fondness and a predilection for a certain pursuit, is the best possible guaranty that he will follow it faithfully. His love for it, aside from all other motives, will insure the intensest application to it as a matter of course. No

need of spurs to the little Handel or the boy Bach to study music, when one steals midnight interviews with a smuggled clavichord in a secret attic, and the other copies whole books of studies by moonlight, for want of a candle, churlishly denied. No need of whips to the boy-painter, West, when he begins in a garret, and plunders the family cat for bristles to make his brushes. On the other hand, to spend years at college, at the work-bench, or in a store, and then find that the calling is a wrong one, is disheartening to all but men of the toughest fibre. The discovery shipwrecks the feeble, and plunges ordinary minds into despair. Doubly trying is this discovery when one feels that the mistake was made in defiance of friendly advice, or to gratify a freak of fancy or an idle whim. The sorrows that come upon us by the will of God, or through the mistakes of our parents, we can submit to with comparative resignation; but the sorrows which we have wrought by our own hand, the pitfalls into which we have fallen by obstinately going our own way, these are the sore places of memory which no time and no patience can salve over.

And yet what "trifles, light as air," often decide a young man's calling, leading one to choose that for which nature designed him, another to choose the very one for which he has the least aptitude! It has been said of our race that we are "not only pleased, but turned by a feather; the history of man is a calendar of straws." The force of early impressions in determining the choice of a profession is often deep and controlling. Thus David Hume, who in his youth was a believer in Christianity, was appointed in a debating society to advocate the cause of infidelity, and thus familiarizing himself with the subtle sophisms of scepticism, became a life-long deist. Voltaire, it is said, at the age of five committed to memory a sceptical poem, and the impressions made upon his mind were never obliterated. There was an intimate connection between the little cannon and the mimic armies with which the boy Napoleon amused himself, and the martial achievements of the Emperor; between the miniature ship which Nelson, when a

boy, sailed on the pond, and the victories of the Nile and Trafalgar; between the tales and songs about ghosts, fairies, witches, warlocks, wraiths, apparitions, etc., with which the mind of Burns was fed in his boyhood by the superstitious old woman domesticated under the same roof with himself, and the tale of Tam O'Shanter; between the old traditions and legends which formed the staple of Scott's early reading, and the brilliant fictions with which the "Wizard of the North" charmed the world; between the story of a farmer's son who went away to seek his fortune, and came home after many years a rich man, — which George Law, a farmer's boy, found in an old, stray volume, and the subsequent career of George Law the steamboat king and millionnaire.

It is said of the great philanthropist, Thomas Clarkson, that when he was a competitor for a prize for an essay at Cambridge, he had never thought upon the subject to be handled, which was, "May one man lawfully enslave another?" Chancing one day to pick up in a friend's house a newspaper advertising a History of Guinea, he hastened to London, bought the work, and there found a picture of cruelties that filled his soul with horror. 66 Coming one day in sight of Wade's mill in Hertfordshire," he says, "I sat down disconsolate on the turf by the roadside, and held my horse. Here a thought came into my mind, that, if the contents of this essay were true, it was time that some person should see those calamities to their end." It was but a straw that decided the destiny of Demosthenes, when, burning with shame, he rushed from the Athenian assembly, resolved, doubtless, never again to ascend the bema. He met Satyrus, learned the art of elocution, and when he next addressed the people, his lip was roughened by no grit of the pebble. Again, Socrates, meeting Xenophon in a narrow gateway, checks his course by placing a stick across the path, and addresses to him a question in morals. Xenophon cannot answer, and the philosopher, bidding him follow, becomes thenceforward his master in ethics. "These incidents were shadows of leaves on the stream; but they conducted Demos