MISTAKES IN LIFE.

THERE is something wonderfully pathetic in the idea of mistakes in life, even before we have any distinct impression with whom the mistake lies. The very term is a tender reproach upon Fate, as though that power set men to choose blindfold in matters importing their lasting interests, and punished them for choosing wrong. Regrets and repinings upon what might have been if things had not happened just as they did happen-if we had not done just what we did do-are a very familiar resource of melancholy or ill-humour. And a very natural one; for who can tell the weighty consequences of even a trivial action, all that is bound up in the decisions we are every day called upon to make upon what appear insufficient grounds for a right judgment? Most people, looking back on their career, must be tempted to think their life would have been more successful and complete but for certain blunders which were slipt into most unconsciously, and without any view to their bearing. They imagine that differences

then seemingly unimportant would have altered their whole course, and altered it, as they are disposed to think, materially for the better.

The subject is a very wide and vague one. If we choose, we may call history a series of mistakes; but dispassionately to note the mistakes of others, either in a past age or in our own, is merely one form of observation, and as such does not affect the mind as a personal question, or influence the character in a selfish direction. There are people who are always dwelling on their own mistakes, and the mistakes of others towards them; and as this form of regret commonly takes the line of having cheated ourselves, or having been cheated, out of some of the good things of this world-place and name, more money and more friends, everything involved in success in life—it is a question whether the theme is ever a very profitable one, even where a man rigidly confines himself to his own share of the blunder. But, in fact, no one can indulge in this turn of thought long without implicating friends, connections, and allies in the disgrace. It is disagreeable to dwell for long exclusively on our own follies. The mind. irresistibly seeks for partners in a scrape, and men are so bound up in one another that it can always find them. It is certain that people apt with the phrases, "It was a great mistake," "I made a great mistake," cannot carry on the strain beyond the first confession. without falling foul of their friends' dealing with them. To start with, they are perhaps conscious of failing in certain preliminary elements of success; yet it is but a

sour sort of humility to point out defects in their education, though there may be truth in it. The human race is a race of mistake-makers. Education has never

been free from mistakes, and probably very grave ones. If a man has been brought up with scrupulous care, he is the victim of theory. If he has had the chances of other boys, study of individual character has been wanting. In some degree or other his spirit has either been cowed by severity, or spoilt by over-indulgence. If left to himself, he acquires desultory habits. If held to hard mental labour, imagination is sacrificed. If parents have a large promiscuous acquaintance, they entail on their son the task of exclusion. If they belong to a party, he starts one of a clique; if they avoid society for his sake, he enters life solitary, unsupported, and without the power to make friends; if they interfered in his choice of a calling, his inclination might not be sufficiently consulted; if they left him to choose, he was thrown prematurely upon a judgment unfit for the responsibility. No circumstances have ever been perfectly happy, no management has ever been entirely judicious; no man's friends have in all respects acted wisely by him; and in every training a hundred things have been ill done or fraught with danger. It is the facility of shifting off some of the burden and the blame of our worst mistakes that makes this habit the most spurious of all forms of repentance, and often a mere ungrateful sham of contrition. To see a man, poker in hand, on a wet day, dashing at the coals, and moodily counting up the

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world's mistakes against him, is neither a dignified nor an engaging spectacle; and our sympathy flags, with the growing conviction that no man is an utter victim to the mistakes of others who has not an ineradicable propensity to make mistakes himself, and that people are constantly apt to attribute a state of things to one particular condition or mischance which, sooner or later, must have happened from some inherent weakness and openness to attack. There is, besides, the experience, which must in its degree be universal, that wishes and expectations by no means necessarily suggest the means to their attainment, and that in youth especially we have often very earnestly wanted a thing, and yet taken no steps, or just the wrong ones, to get it, vaguely expecting our desires to accomplish themselves, though our outer life and actions may even wilfully run counter to them.

That subtle discrepancy between thought and action which is to be observed in speculative, self-conscious characters, brings about some of the more recondite mistakes of life. They are caused by refusing to believe in the natural consequences of actions-by not counting the cost. Thus an act of large and exceptional liberality often looks like a mistake-not at the time, when we are dazzled by the air of self-sacrifice, but when we compare it with the rest of a man's course, and note its effect upon his character, which is the only test of the consistency of the motive originally at work. Something on the same principle, Machiavel called a single unsupported act of gene

rosity in an unscrupulous scheme of policy a mere blunder-noting the great mistake it is to "mingle isolated acts of mercy with extreme measures." It sounds horribly cold-blooded, and sinks him lower than ever in the disesteem of modern readers; but he may have taken a juster measure than we do at this distance of the motive which prompted the discordant generosity. However, we must not dwell on this part of our subject, though a writer in the 'Spectator' did propose it "as no unacceptable piece of entertainment to the town to inquire into the hidden features of the blunders and mistakes of wise men."

Of course, all people reviewing their own lives must see in them great mistakes-wonderful mistakesperhaps a mere series of mistakes as compared to that ideal of life with which they started, and in contrast with which the reality is a thing of shreds and patches, beginnings without endings, ceaseless fluctuations of design, so that we have something to do to trace the one mind at work through the successions of change. Yet we may be sure that this is just what others can see in us. It may be noted that where men themselves attribute ill-success or mischance to separate distinct mistakes-as, for instance, to the choice of such an adviser, the engaging in such a speculation— those who have to observe them trace all to character. They see that if failure had not come at such a juncture, it must at some other, from certain flaws in the man's nature which he must heal and repair before he can go straight-that mistakes simply mark occasions