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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,

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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. "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

thenes into the temple of eloquence, and placed Xenophon by the side of Livy."

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Let every one, then, who would get on in the world, study his aptitudes, for what calling he is naturally fit. We are aware that some men, and men of sagacity, too, have denied this doctrine of natural tendencies, and held that any person, by dint of energy, may become whatever he chooses. Lord Chesterfield held this view. Any young man, he declared, if he will but take the pains, may become as learned, eloquent, graceful, and agreeable as he pleases. Without the slightest reference to natural aptitude, he may confidently set about making himself a courtier, a diplomatist, an orator, in short, anything but a poet, and he need not utterly despair of success in verse. Acting on these principles, his Lordship labored for years to mould his dull, heavy, loutish son, Stanhope, into a graceful man of fashion. A more absurd scheme was never attempted, and the result was what might have been expected,

utter failure. There are thousands of such cases where a parent might as well tell a son to be six feet high as to be eloquent, to have a Roman nose as to be graceful, to write like Hawthorne as to bow like the Duc de Richelieu. As SainteBeuve says: "On est toujours l'esclave de son premier talent." Doubtless the natural bent is sometimes hard to discern; but as the boy is father of the man, so he generally shows what sort of a man he is likely to turn out. Talents for special kinds of work are congenital, and men have often their callings forecast in the very sockets of their eyeballs and in the bulgings of their thumbs. Even if we deny the whole doctrine of inborn aptitudes, and believe that the differences in men's capabilities, tastes, and tendencies are the effects of external circumstances, yet it must be admitted that these differences are fixed too early to be removed. Michael Angelo neglected school to copy drawings which he dared not bring home. Murillo filled the margin of his school-book with drawings. Dryden read Polybius before he was ten years old. Le Brun, in childhood, drew with a piece of charcoal on the walls of the

house. Pope wrote excellent verses at fourteen. Pascal composed at sixteen a tractate on the Conic Sections. Lawrence painted beautifully when a mere boy. Madame de Staël was deep in the philosophy of politics at an age when other girls were dressing dolls. Nelson had made up his mind to be a hero before he was old enough to be a midshipman; and Napoleon was already at the head of armies when pelting snow-balls at Brienne.

Dryden, who was an illustration of his own theory, has aptly marked the three steps in the career of most men of genius:

"What the child admired,

The youth endeavored, and the man ACQUIRED.”

In many cases so early is the preference manifested, that it would seem as if the callings, impatient to be chosen, selected their own agents, and storming heart, hands, and brain, made them captive to their will. "We are not surprised," says a writer, "to hear from a schoolfellow of the Chancellor Somers that he was a weakly boy, who always had a book in his hand, and never looked up at the play of his companions; to learn from his affectionate biographer that Hammond at Eton sought opportunities of stealing away to say his prayers; to read that Tournefort forsook his college class, that he might search for plants in the neighboring fields; or that Smeaton, in petticoats, was discovered on the top of his father's barn, in the act of fixing the model of a windmill which he had constructed. These early traits of character are such as we expect to find in the cultivated lawyer, who turned the eyes of his age upon Milton; in the Christian, whose life was one varied strain of devout praise; in the naturalist, who enriched science by his discoveries; and in the engineer, who built the Eddystone lighthouse."

When that prodigy of genius and precocity, Chatterton, "the marvellous boy, the sleepless soul, that perished in his pride," was but eight years old, a manufacturer, desiring to present him with a cup, asked him what device should be in

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