Everybody begins life with a four-leaved shamrock in view, an ideal of his own, that he follows up with considerable wrong-headedness to the end. Such fiction has a great deal to answer for in the way of disappointment, dissatisfaction, and disgust. Many natures find themselves completely soured and deteriorated before middle age, and why? Because, forsooth, they have been through the garden with no better luck than their neighbours. I started in business, we will say, with good connections, sufficient capital, and an ardent desire to make a fortune. Must I be a saddened, morose, world-wearied man because, missing that unaccountable rise in muletwist, and taking the subsequent fall in grey shirtings too late, I have only realised a competency, while Bullion, who didn’t want it, made at least twenty thou.? Or I wooed Fortune as a soldier, fond of the profession, careless of climate, prodigal of my person, ramming my head wherever there was a chance of having it knocked off, “sticking to it like a leech, sir; never missing a day’s duty, by Jove! while other fellows were getting on the staff, shooting up the country, or going home on sick leave.” So I remain nothing but an overworked field-officer, grim and grey, with an enlarged liver, and more red in my nose than my cheeks, while Dawdle is a major-general commanding in a healthy district, followed about by two aides-de-camp, enjoying a lucrative appointment with a fair chance of military distinction. Shall I therefore devote to the lowest pit of Acheron the Horse Guards, the War Office, H.R.H. the Commander-in-Chief, and the service of Her Majesty the Queen? How many briefless barristers must you multiply to obtain a Lord Chancellor, or even a Chief Baron? How many curates go to a bishop? How many village practitioners to a fashionable doctor in a London-built brougham? Success in every line, while it waits, to a certain extent, on perseverance and capacity, partakes thus much in the nature of a lottery, that for one prize there must be an incalculable number of blanks. I will not go so far as to say that you should abstain from the liberal professions of arts or arms, that you should refrain from taking your ticket in the lottery, or in any way rest idly in mid-stream, glad to “Loose the sail, shift the oar, let her float down, Fleeting and gliding by tower and town;” but I ask you to remember that the marshal’s baton can only be in one conscript’s knapsack out of half a million; that wigs and mitres, and fees every five minutes, fall only to one in ten thousand; that although everybody has an equal chance in the lottery, that chance may be described as but half a degree better than the cipher which represents zero.