own abilities he might have effected for himself, his good
luck will excite less attention and the instances be less remembered.
That clever men should attain their objects seems natural, and we
neglect the circumstances that perhaps produced that success of
themselves without the intervention of skill or foresight; but we
dwell on the fact and remember it, as something strange, when the same
happens to a weak or ignorant man. So, too, tho the latter should fail
in his undertakings from concurrences that might have happened to the
wisest man, yet his failure being no more than might have been
expected and accounted for from his folly, it lays no hold on our
attention, but fleets away among the other undistinguished waves, in
which the stream of ordinary life murmurs by us and is forgotten. Had
it been as true as it was notoriously false, that those all-embracing
discoveries, which have shed a dawn of science on the art of
chemistry, and give no obscure promise of some one great constitutive
law, in the light of which dwell dominion and the power of prophecy;
if these discoveries, instead of having been, as they really were,
preconcerted by meditation, and evolved out of his own intellect, had
occurred by a set of lucky accidents to the illustrious father and
founder of philosophic alchemy; if they presented themselves to Sir
Humphry Davy exclusively in consequence of his luck in possessing a
particular galvanic battery; if this battery, as far as Davy was
concerned, had itself been an accident, and not (as in point of fact
it was) desired and obtained by him for the purpose of insuring the
testimony of experience to his principles, and in order to bind down
material nature under the inquisition of reason, and forced from her
as by torture, unequivocal answers to prepared and preconceived
questions--yet still they would not have been talked of or described
as instances of luck, but as the natural results of his admitted
genius and known skill. But should an accident have disclosed similar
discoveries to a mechanic at Birmingham or Sheffield, and if the man
should grow rich in consequence, and partly by the envy of his
neighbors, and partly with good reason, be considered by them as a man
below par in the general powers of his understanding; then, "Oh what a
lucky fellow! Well, Fortune does favor fools--that's certain! It is
always so!"--and forthwith the exclaimer relates half a dozen similar
instances. Thus accumulating