The Way to Succeed. By W. M. Thayer. (Hodder and
Stough- ton.)—Mr. Thayer has some advice to give, and enforces it with abundance of illustrative anecdote. He quotes a saying of one of his heroes, who was asked to describe the secret of his success, and replied : "Tact, push, and principle." This, he says, "covers the whole subject." But, after all, some of the greatest benefactors of the world have had very little of the first and second. There is a contemplative side to life which has not been less fruitful of good than the practical. Mr. Thayer, of course, would not deny this. Still, it is well to remember that there is something else to be believed besides the "gospel of getting on." On the subjects of alcohol and tobacco, our author seems to lose his self-control and power of insight. Surely the physician who was utterly over- come when an abstainer cited to him the instance of Samson as the strongest man in the world and an abstainer, was a somewhat week-kneed person. On tobacco, Mr. Thayer emits a " counter- blast " which is even more fiery than King James's. "It takes the spring out of the nerves, the firmness out of the muscles, the ring out of the voice ; it renders the memory less retentive, the judgment less accurate, the conscience less quick, the sensibilities less acute. It relaxes the will, and dulls every faculty of body and mind and moral nature, dragging the entire man down in the scale of his powers." Yet Milton smoked, and Sir Isaac Newton ; and so does Lord Tennyson.
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