Assume your own position. Put potatoes in a cart, over a rough road, and the small ones go to the bottom."

Never depend upon your genius," said John Ruskin, in the words of Joshua Reynolds; "if you have talent, industry will improve it; if you have none, industry will supply the deficiency."

The only merit to which I lay claim," said Hugh Miller, "is that of patient research-a merit in which whoever wills may rival or surpass me; and this humble faculty of patience when rightly developed may lead to more extraordinary development of ideas than even genius itself."

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Titian, the greatest master of color the world has seen, used to say: White, red and black, these are all the colors that a painter needs, but he must know how to use them.' It took fifty years of constant, hard practice to bring him to his full mastery.

"How much grows everywhere if we do but wait!" exclaims Carlyle. 'Not a difficulty but can transfigure itself into a triumph; not even a deformity, but if our own soul have imprinted worth on it, will grow dear to us."

Persistency is characteristic of all men who have accomplished anything great. They may lack in some other particular, have many weaknesses, or eccentricities, but the quality of persistence is never absent in a successful man. No matter what opposition

he meets or what discouragements overtake him, he is always persistent. Drudgery cannot disgust him, obstacles cannot discourage him, labor cannot weary him. He will persist, no matter what comes or what goes; it is a part of his nature. could almost as easily stop breathing.

He

It is not so much brilliancy of intellect or fertility of resource as persistency of effort, constancy of purpose, that makes a great man. Persistency always gives confidence. Everybody believes in the man who persists. He may meet misfortunes, sorrows and reverses, but everybody believes that he will ultimately triumph because they know there is no keeping him down. "Does he keep at it, is he persistent?" is the question which the world asks of a man.

Even the man with small ability will often succeed if he has the quality of persistence, where a genius without persistence would fail.

How hard I worked at that tremendous shorthand, and all improvement appertaining to it," said Dickens. "I will only add to what I have already written of my perseverance at this time of my life, and of a patient and continuous energy which then began to be matured within me, and which I know to be the strong point of my character, if it have any strength at all, that there, on looking back, I find the source of my success."

"I am sorry to say that I don't think this is in your line,' said Woodfall the reporter, after Sheridan had made his first speech in Parliament. "You had better have stuck to your former pursuits." With head on his hand Sheridan mused for a time, then looked up and said, "It is in me, and it shall come out of me. "" From the same man came that harangue against Warren Hastings which the orator Fox called the best speech ever made in the House of Commons.

"The man who is perpetually hesitating which of two things he will do first," said William Wirt, "will do neither." The man who resolves, but suffers his resolution to be changed by the first counter-suggestion of a friend-who fluctuates from opinion to opinion, from plan to plan, and veers like a weather-cock to every point of the compass, with every breath of caprice that blows, can never accomplish anything great or useful. Instead of being progressive in anything, he will be at best stationary, and, more probably, retrograde in all,

Great writers have ever been noted for their tenacity of purpose. Their works have not been flung off from minds aglow with genius, but have been elaborated and elaborated into grace and beauty, until every trace of their efforts has been obliterated. Bishop Butler worked twenty years incessantly on his "Analogy," and even then

was so dissatisfied that he wanted to burn it. Rousseau says he obtained the ease and grace of his style only by ceaseless inquietude, by endless blotches and erasures. Virgil worked eleven years on the Æneid. The note-books of great men like Hawthorne and Emerson are tell-tales of enormous drudgery, of the years put into a book which may be read in an hour. Montesquieu was twenty-five years writing his "Esprit de Louis," yet you can read it in sixty minutes. Adam Smith spent ten years on his "Wealth of Nations." A rival playwright once laughed at Euripides for spending three days on three lines, when he had written five hundrel lines. "But your five hundred lines in three days will be dead and forgotten, while my three lines will live forever," replied Euripides.

Sir Fowell Buxton thought he could do as well as others, if he devoted twice as much time and labor as they did. Ordinary means and extraordinary application have done most of the great things in the world.

Defoe offered the manuscript of Robinson Crusoe to many booksellers and all but one refused it. Addison's first play, Rosamond, was hissed off the stage, but the editor of the Spectator and Tattler was made of stern stuff and was determined that the world should listen to him, and it did.

David Livingstone said: "Those who have never carried a book through the press can form no idea of the amount of toil it

involves. The process has increased my respect for authors a thousand-fold. I think I would rather cross the African continent again than undertake to write another book.'

"For the statistics of the negro population of South America alone," says Robert Dale Owen, "I examined more than a hundred and fifty volumes."

Another author tells us that he wrote paragraphs and whole pages of his book as many as fifty times.

It is said of one of Longfellow's poems that it was written in four weeks, but that he spent six months in correcting and cutting it down. Bulwer declared that he had rewritten some of his briefer productions as many as eight or nine times before their publication. One of Tennyson's pieces was rewritten fifty times. John Owen was twenty years on his Commentary on the Epistle

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to the Hebrews; Gibbon on his "Decline and Fall," twenty years; and Adam Clark, on his "Commentary," twenty-six years. Carlyle spent fifteen years on his "Frederick the Great."

A great deal of time is consumed in reading before some books are prepared. George Eliot read 1000 books before she wrote

Daniel Deronda." Allison read 2000 before he completed his history. It is said of another that he read 20,000 and wrote only two books.