ll my life, I can say with truth that
experience has been my school and my only one.

"Many believe that my life has been a success from the start, and I
do not try to undeceive them, but as a matter of fact my failures
have exceeded my successes as one hundred to one; but even the
experience of these failures has been in itself an educator and has
enabled me not to repeat them."

The brave man will not be baffled, but tries and tries again until he
succeeds. The tree does not fall at the first stroke, but only by
repeated strokes and after great labor. We may see the visible
success at which a man has arrived, but forget the toil and
suffering and peril through which it has been achieved. For the same
reason, it is often of advantage for a man to be under the necessity
of having to struggle with poverty and conquer it. "He who has
battled," says Carlyle, "were it only with poverty and hard toil,
will be found stronger and more expert than he who could stay at
home from the battle, concealed among the provision wagons, or even
rest unwatchfully 'abiding by the stuff.'"

Scholars have found poverty tolerable compared with the privation of
intellectual food. Riches weigh much more heavily upon the mind. "I
cannot but choose say to Poverty," said Richter, "Be welcome! So
that thou come not too late in life." Poverty, Horace tells us,
drove him to poetry and poetry introduced him to Varus and Virgil
and Maecenas. "Obstacles," says Michelet, "are great incentives. I
lived for whole years upon a Virgil and found myself well off."

Many have to make up their minds to encounter failure again and again
before they succeed; but if they have pluck, the failure will only
serve to rouse their courage and stimulate them to renewed efforts.
Talma, the greatest of actors, was hissed off the stage when he
first appeared on it. Lacordaire, one of the greatest preachers of
modern times, only acquired celebrity after repeated failures.
Montalembert said of his first public appearance in the church of
St. Roch: He failed completely, and, on coming out, every one said,
"Though he may be a man of talent he will never be a preacher."
Again and again he tried, until he succeeded, and only two years
after his _debut_, Lacordaire was preaching in Notre Dame to
audiences such as few French orators have addressed since the time
of Bossuet and Massilon.

When Mr. Cobden first appeared as a speaker at a public meeting in
Manchester, he complet