Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER IL The Honourable Frederick Lovell. Will no one write for us the lives of Unsuccessful Men? The brothers of the poets, the first cousins of the painters, the godmothers and godfathers of the novelists,—enterprising writers of biography have shown us these and all other relations of great men from their cradles to their graves. And still the human beings nearer to greatness still,—the men who have not succeeded,—find no historian. "He started with eighteen-pence in his pocket," we are accustomed to read of the one successful man out of ten thousand. "Eighteen-pence in his pocket, a habit of early rising, strict religious principles, and a taste for arithmetic; and died worth half a million." All right for him,—the one sheep garnered into the great fold of success; but what account have we of the rest of the shadowy host for whose prudence, whose patience, whose religious principles, whose arithmetic even, no market ever came? If there is any law that governs the secret of human success, we have signally failed as yet in discovering its mode of operation. Patience certainly goes a very short way towards attaining it—the great majority of men and women seem to be intensely patient at failure during all their wasted sixty or seventy years of life; and as to great ability, look at some of the best-paid, and yet the shallowest charlatans in the world's history! Some years ago a Frenchman wrote a book, showing that unsuccessful men of ability are destined by every law, moral and physiological, to become the progenitors of successful ones. Given a father whose life has been spent in a series of intellectual failures, and you will most likely see a son in whom these inchoate tendencies shall assume the shape men worship as success. All the arguments of the book I have f... --This text refers to the Paperback edition.