talents and ability--that cleverness or
genius can be a substitute for diligence. Here the old fable of the
hare and the tortoise applies. They both started to run a race. The
hare, trusting to her natural gift of fleetness, turned aside and took
a sleep; the tortoise plodded on and won the prize. Constant and
well-sustained labor carries one through, where cleverness apart from
this fails. History tells us that the greatest genius is most diligent
in the cultivation of its powers. The cleverest men have been of great
industry and unflinching perseverance. No truly eminent man was ever
other than an industrious man.

(_b_) There are some who think that success is in the main a matter of
what they call "luck," the product of circumstances over which they
have little or no control. If circumstances are favorable they need
not work; if they are unfavorable they need not work. So far from man
being the creature of circumstances he should rather be termed the
architect of circumstances. From the same materials one man builds
palaces and another hovels. Bricks and mortar are mortar and bricks
till the architect makes something out of them. In the same way, out
of the same circumstances one man rears a stately edifice, while
another, idle and incompetent, lives for ever amid ruins.
Circumstances rarely conquer a strong man; he conquers them. He

Breaks his birth's invidious bar
And grasps the skirts of happy chance,
And breasts the blows of circumstance,
And grapples with his evil star.--TENNYSON.

Against all sorts of opposing obstacles the great workers of the world
fought their way to triumph. Milton wrote _Paradise Lost_ in blindness
and poverty. Luther, before he could establish the Reformation, had to
encounter the prestige of a thousand years, the united power of an
imperious hierarchy and the ban of the German Empire. Linnaeus,
studying botany, was so poor as to be obliged to mend his shoes with
folded paper and often to beg his meals of his friends. Columbus, the
discoverer of America, had to besiege and importune in turn the states
of Genoa, Portugal, Venice, France, England, and Spain, before he could
get the control of three small vessels and 120 men. Hugh Miller, who
became one of the first geological writers of his time, was apprenticed
to a stonemason, and while working in the quarry, had already begun to
study the stratum of red sandstone lying below one of red clay. George
Ste