are
likely to do harm rather than good to young persons who have outgrown
their moral strength. It would be more humane to prescribe a treatment
which, though it cannot cure, may alleviate their most distressing
symptoms, and enable them to bear the burden of life without too much
suffering. I shall, therefore, exhibit some of the methods by which
young fellows of tolerable education and address may get along without
undue exertion,--_Disce puer fortunam ex me, verumque laborem ex aliis_.
For a youngster of good nerves and hopeful temperament there is nothing
better than speculation,--as gambling without pasteboard and ivory is
called. Up to-day and down to-morrow is as pleasant and exciting to men
of that mould as seesaws and swings to children with strong stomachs.
But let those made of feebler stuff beware. Between the two millstones
of winning and losing they will be ground into despair, or into
shameless roguery. "Broad is the way that leadeth to destruction, and
many there be which go in thereat."

There is no simpler way of "achieving honorable maintenance" than to
marry an heiress. But to seek fortune in matrimony is almost like
looking for it in a lottery. By some mysterious law of Providence, rich
people draw the high prizes. Money is apt to fall in love with money.
The female dollar prefers the attentions of her own kind. Cupid, "once a
god," as Tennyson writes, "is now a lawyer's clerk," with sharp eyes
wide open; and suits _in forma pauperis_ are as little likely to succeed
in courts of love as in courts of law.

Politics being a subject everybody understands by instinct, young men
will naturally turn their attention that way. The number of offices with
salaries make this country almost that Frenchman's Utopia imagined by
Madame de Stael, where every adult male was to be a public officer paid
by the state. We have even more than this. When all other hopes break
down, there is the custom-house,--that last infirmary of noble minds who
have failed in every attempt to cure the aches that empty pockets are
heirs to. No doubt the profession of politics is generally remunerative;
but where I live, a foreign order of nature's nobility rules us. We
Saxons have fought our battle of Hastings at the polls, and have lost
it; and no one can hope to hold office here, unless he came over with
Murphy the Conqueror. Even should he combine in his person that
profitable conjunction of knavery, impudence, and laziness which we