Page:Whyte-Melville--Bones and I.djvu/167

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THE FOUR-LEAVED SHAMROCK.
159

Majesty the Queen? How many briefless barristers must you multiply to obtain a Lord Chancellor, or even a Chief Baron? How many curates go to a bishop? How many village practitioners to a fashionable doctor in a London-built brougham? Success in every line, while it waits, to a certain extent, on perseverance and capacity, partakes thus much in the nature of a lottery, that for one prize there must be an incalculable number of blanks.

I will not go so far as to say that you should, abstain from the liberal professions of arts or arms, that you should refrain from faking your ticket in the lottery, or in any way rest idly in mid-stream, glad to


"Loose the sail, shift the oar, let her float down,
Fleeting and gliding by tower and town;


but I ask you to remember that the marshal's baton can only be in one conscript's knapsack out of half a million; that wigs