Such is the Waywardness of Fate, that one man sucks an orange, and is choked by a pip; another swallows a penknife, and lives: one runs a thorn into his hand, and no skill can save him (a fact of recent date); another has a shaft of a gig passed completely through his body, and recovers: one is overturned on a smooth common, and breaks his neck; another is tossed out of a gig over Brighton cliff, and survives: one walks on a windy day, and meets death by a brickbat; another is blown up into the air, like Lord Hatton, in Guernsey Castle, and comes down uninjured. The escape of this nobleman was indeed a miracle. An explosion of gunpowder, which killed his mother, wife, some of his children, and many other persons, and blew up the whole fabric of the castle, lodged him and his bed on a wall overhanging a tremendous precipice. Perceiving a mighty disorder (as he might expect), he was going to step out of his bed to know what was the matter, which, if he had done, he would have been irrecoverably lost; but, in the instant of this moving, a flash of lightning came and showed him the precipice, whereupon he lay still till people came and took him down.[129] There is an almost prophetic meaning in the following passage from Berkeley’s “Essay towards Preventing the Ruin of Great Britain,” written soon after the affair of the South-Sea Scheme: “All projects for growing rich by sudden extraordinary methods, as they operate violently on the passions of men, and encourage them to despise the slow moderate gains that are to be made by an honest industry, must be ruinous to the public; and even the winners themselves will at length be involved in the public ruin.” Theodore Hook was one of the most experienced exponents of the Town Life of his day: in habits, a bachelor, notwithstanding his industry as a man of letters, he saw more of the outside world than the majority of idle men. He has left many of these experiences in his novels, which, as pictures of life, are valuable. Thus, in _Gilbert Gurney_, he gives this admirable bit of club criticism: “People who are conscious of what is due to themselves never display irritability or impetuosity; their manners insure civility—their own civility secures respect: but the blockhead or the coxcomb, fully aware that something more than ordinary is necessary to produce an effect, is sure, whether in clubs or coffee-houses, to be the most fastidious and factious of the community, the most overbearing in his manners towards his inferiors, the most restless and irritable among his equals, the most cringing and subservient before his superiors.” No man could utter such criticism with more complete safety from being answered with a _Tu quoque_. --------------------- Footnote 127: Swift. Footnote 128: Paley. Footnote 129: _New Monthly Magazine._ ---------------------------- PREDICTIONS OF SUCCESS.