med to have decreed his ruin.

Take a man of another stamp, and observe how he met the first blows of
Fortune. Thomas Carlyle had dwelt on a lonely moorland for six years.
He came to London and employed himself with feverish energy on a book
which he thought would win him bread, even if it did not gain him
fame. Writing was painful to him, and he never set down a sentence
without severe labour. With infinite pains he sought out the history
of the French Revolution and obtained a clear picture of that
tremendous event. Piece by piece he put his first volume together and
satisfied himself that he had done something which would live. He
handed his precious manuscript to Stuart Mill, and Mill's servant lit
the fire with it. Carlyle had exhausted his means, and his great work
was really his only capital. Like all men who write at high pressure,
he was unable to recall anything that he had once set down, and, so
far as his priceless volume went, his mind was a blank. Years of toil
were thrown away; time was fleeting, and the world was careless of the
matchless historian. The first news of his loss stunned him, and, had
he been a weak man, he would have collapsed under the blow. He saw
nothing but bitter poverty for himself and his wife, and he had some
thoughts of betaking himself to the Far West; but he conquered his
weakness, forgot his despair in labour, and doggedly re-wrote the
masterpiece which raised him to instant fame and caused him to be
regarded as one of the first men in Britain. In the whole wide history
of human trials I cannot recall a more shining instance of fortitude
and triumphant victory over obstacles. Let those who are cast down by
some petty trouble think of the lonely, poverty-stricken student
bending himself to his task after the very light of his life had been
dimmed for a while.

There is nothing like an array of instances for driving home an
argument, so I mention the case of a man about whom much debate goes
on even to this day. Napoleon starved in the streets of Paris; one by
one he sold his books to buy bread; he was without light or fire on
nights of iron frost, and his clothing was too scanty to keep out the
cold. He arrived at that pass which induces some men to end all their
woes by one swift plunge into the river; but he was not of the
despairful stamp, and he stood his term of misery bravely until the
light came for him. Leave his splendid, chequered career of glory and
crime out of reck