A distinguished Italian author has put forward the theory that all men may become great men, may become poets, painters, and orators;--as if the sole difference between genius and mediocrity were the power of application. We think it impossible for any calm and sober judgment to accept such a hypothesis. We do not believe that any amount of diligence or perseverance, however continuous and well-directed, could convert a versifier into a Milton, or a blacksmith into a Smeaton. But then we may all take to ourselves the consolation that it is neither desirable nor necessary that we should all be Smeatons and Miltons; that what we have mainly to consider is this,--the doing our best in whatever position the will of Providence may have assigned to us, since, by so doing, we may reasonably hope to swell the sum of human happiness and human good. And the benefit we may derive from a study of the career and character of Smeaton is to be found in the encouragement it gives us to lead a life of patient and assiduous labour. For the reader, as for Smeaton, God has provided a vocation, if he will but earnestly seek to discover it; and when he once sees the path of duty before him, he will assuredly gain his reward if he perseveres in it with singleness of aim and loftiness of purpose. [Sidenote: Lessons from great lives.] If it is not necessary for every man to become a Watt or a Smeaton, and if it is not given to every man to win the success which a Watt or a Smeaton achieved, yet it is possible for each one of us to attain to a certain standard of character and capacity, and to acquire a reasonable measure of prosperity. As we have elsewhere written, biography is full of examples of what may be accomplished by a resolute will; what may be done by the industry that never wearies and the energy that never flags. Long and brilliant is the record of men who have attained greatness under the most unfavourable conditions. The great voyager who opened up a New World to the enterprise of the West was in early life a weaver. The able German historian of the Roman Republic began as a peasant. Sextus V., one of the most capable of the many capable men who have sat in the chair of St. Peter, commenced his career as a swine-herd. Every school-boy knows that Æsop, the most successful of all fabulists, was a slave; Homer, "The blind old man of Scio's rocky isle,"