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 wishes, of kindness for the struggling, of encouragement for the discouraged, of charity for the so-called failures.
It is said that a Yankee has arranged to furnish foreign titles (warranted genuine) of "earl or count for $10,000; European orders, from $250 to $10,000; membership in foreign scientific and literary societies, $250 and upward." The story is plausible. Impecunious princes and potentates have been known to replenish their purses in this way, though hitherto usually by private sale rather than market quotations. It is not probable that our ingenious countryman has the Order of the Seraphim or of the Annonciade at disposal, or that he can supply the Golden Fleece to whoever will "gif a good prishe," or even that he would pretend to furnish the Black Eagle of Prussia in quantities to suit purchasers. He can hardly be the medium of creating many Knights of the Garter, nor can the Bath or the St. Michael and St. George very well be in his list of decorations "to order." But we know from the Paris and Vienna fairs that a Cross of the Legion is obtainable by Americans of the mercantile class; and as for the Lion and the Sun, it was an order created by some bygone shah for the express purpose of rewarding strangers who had rendered service to Persia; and what service more substantial, pray, than helping to fill the Persian purse? When you come to central and southern Europe, titles are going a-begging, and hard-up princelets will presumably be eager to raise the wind with them.