If we hold with Scripture that he who ruleth his spirit is greater than he that taketh a city, we must not give all the laurels of success to the mighty, wealthy, witty, and renowned. Poor John Jones, the clerk yonder at a thousand a year, if we reckon at anything gentleness, courage, simplicity, devotion to mother, wife, and babes, has made as great a success of life as old Rollin Ritchie, the head of the house. You would imagine a first use of wealth to be the liberty to pick at will one's employees and allies, one's friends and agents, to repel the dishonest and rebuke the impudent, dealing with those whom one chooses to deal with, where personal choice can fairly be exercised; but such a privilege is Utopian in business, even among men of fortune, and envied Ritchie has little more freedom than humble Jones. Besides, the pursuit of startling success, though it often ruins possibilities of contentment, rarely creates them. Frédéric Soulié, having had the misfortune to gain $16,000 in one year by his pen, refused a government place at $3,000, with leisure to write an occasional play or a novel; he was eager to produce half a dozen plays and novels in a twelvemonth, says a biographer, and to repeat his $16,000; and he died of work and watching in two years more. We are not, in these kindly Christmas days, to cynically deny to unpromising careers all power of recovery. Temple was telling me the other day of this instance known to him: Honorius had an exceedingly dissolute son, who pursued his vicious courses almost unchecked by parental rein, until he seemed to think his iniquities the rather fostered than forbidden. But one day a friend of both questioned the father why he allowed his son such abused license? "Sir," replied he, "if my son chooses to go to the devil, as he is now fast going, he alone must take the consequences." The conversation being reported to our young rake, he was so affected by the view of his responsibility, which he now appreciated for the first time, as to turn back toward the way of virtue. And as before he had conceived his father in some sort liable for those scandalous excesses, so now, being driven from that strange error, he chooses for himself the path of honor and usefulness. In judging unsuccessful lives, too, we need to make large allowance for the unknown elements of fortune. "It is fate," says the Greek adage, "that bringeth good and bad to men; nor can the gifts of the immortals be refused." But we can find justification for charitable judgments without resorting to this general theory. We discover one youth, who promised well, ruined by a bad choice of profession, while a second, who selected well, finds the immediate problem in life to be not personal eminence, but providing for a wife and half a dozen children: and if he does fitly provide for them, pray, why set down his life, however pruned of its first ambitious pinions, as a failure?