om 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. Frederic Soulie, 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?

So, finally, our unaspiring old-year homily simply chimes in with the
traditional spirit of Christmastide--season of hopeful words and wishe