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CHAPTER III. CHOICE OF A PROFESSION. It ii an uncontroverted truth, that no man ever made an ill-figure wh understood his own talents, nor a good one who mistook them. Swift. The crowning fortune of a man is to be born with a bias to some pursuit, which finds him in employment and happiness. R. W. Emerson. Be what nature intended you for, and you will succeed ; be anything else, and you will be ten thousand times worse than nothing. Sydney Smith. I cannot repeat too often that no man struggles perpetually and victoriously against his own character ; and one of the first principles of success in life is so to regulate our career as rather to turn our physical constitution and natural inclinations to good account, than to endeavor to counteract the one or oppose the other.Sir H. L. Bulwer. IT is almost a truism to say that the first thing to be done by him who would succeed in life is to make a wise choice of a profession. Of the thousands of men who are continually coming upon the stage of life, there are few who escape the necessity of adopting some profession or calling; and there are fewer still who, if they knew the miseries of idleness, tenfold keener and more numerous than those of the most laborious profession, would ever desire such an escape. In this age of intense activity, when hundreds of men in every community are killing themselves by overwork, it is hardly necessary to show that there can be no genuine happiness without labor. All sensible men admit, and none more readily than those who have tried the experiment of killing time in a round of amusements, that the happiest life is made up of alternations of toil and leisure, of work and play. So necessary is labor ofsome kind to make existence tolerable, that those men who attempt to live a li...
