ss in most things depends on knowing how long it takes to
succeed.--MONTESQUIEU.

Perpetual pushing and assurance put a difficulty out of countenance,
and make a seeming impossibility give way.--JEREMY COLLIER.

"Unstable as water, thou shalt not excel."

The nerve that never relaxes, the eye that never blanches, the thought
that never wanders,--these are the masters of victory.--BURKE.

"The pit rose at me!" exclaimed Edmund Kean in a wild tumult of
emotion, as he rushed home to his trembling wife. "Mary, you shall
ride in your carriage yet, and Charles shall go to Eton!" He had been
so terribly in earnest with the study of his profession that he had at
length made a mark on his generation. He was a little dark man with a
voice naturally harsh, but he determined, when young, to play the
character of Sir Giles Overreach, in Massinger's drama, as no other man
had ever played it. By a persistency that nothing seemed able to
daunt, he so trained himself to play the character that his success,
when it did come, was overwhelming, and all London was at his feet.

"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 would 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.

"I had no other books than heaven and earth, which are open to all,"
said Bernard Palissy, who left his home in the south of France in 1828,
at the age of eighteen. Though only a glass-painter, he had the soul
of an artist. The sight of an elegant Italian cup disturbed his whole
existence and from that moment the determination to discover the enamel
with which it was glazed possessed him like a passion. For months and
years he tried all kinds of experiments to learn the materials of which
the enamel was compounded. He built a furnace, which was a failure,
and then a second, burning so much wood, spoiling so many drugs and
pots of common earthenware, and losing so much time, that poverty
stared him in the face, and he was forced, from lack of ability to buy
fuel, to try his experiments in a common furnace. Flat failure was the
result, but he decided on the spot to begin all over again, and soon
had