“HE WHO SURPASSES OR SUBDUES MANKIND,”

says Byron, “must look down on the hate of those below.”  “Who soars too near the sun, with golden wings, melts them,” says Shakspeare.  We all have upon us golden wings of happiness.  Let us not soar near the sun.  “Fling away ambition,” mourns old Cardinal Wolsely in Henry VIII; “by that sin fell the angels; how can man, then, the image of his Maker, hope to win by it?” “It often puts men upon doing the meanest offices,” says Swift, “as climbing is performed in the same posture with creeping.”  It has been aptly called by Sir William Davenant,

“THE MIND’S IMMODESTY.”

Watch this petty man.  He is consumed by a desire to be a little higher than he now is.  He is driver on a street car, in a city.  Unconsciously, he is an excellent driver.  He has not become so by the silent care which befits a real climber.  No! he was born a horseman.  But he was also born ambitious.  If he were private secretary to the President, he would want to be President, simply because his attention would be more closely directed to the Chief Magistracy than elsewhere.

BEHOLD HIM INSTALLED AS CONDUCTOR.

He rings the bell incessantly for a milk-wagon to get out of the road.  The passengers expostulate.  One of them is drunk, therefore extra-expostulatory.  Our conductor beholds the moment arrived when he must “bounce” the passenger.  The passenger is landed free on track, with only the conductor’s badge in his mind, which he reports to the office.  The next day the conductor tells a passenger to get his feet off that seat, or he will put him off.  In a dispute which follows, the conductor loses a chance to get across a swinging-bridge, and a passenger who has thus missed a train, gets angry and reports the conductor.  The driver is quietly asked about our friend, and our friend is thrown out of his place like a shot out of a gun.  He is too proud to drive again, and takes a trip into the country for his health.  This homely drama is played in all the hotels where head-waiters are employed, in all the departments of business where head-clerks are needed; in all the great stores where floor-walkers “strut their brief hour,”—­everywhere that gives an opportunity for little Envy to peep, from

THE RIDICULOUS AMBUSCADE

of some incompetent subordinate, out upon the goings and comings of unsuspecting Merit.  “There is a native baseness,” says Simms, “in the ambition which seeks beyond its desert, that never shows more conspicuously than when, no matter how, it temporarily gains its object.”  So, to me, there has always seemed a real baseness in these attempts of unfit people, who have only their self-conceit for training and their cheek for capital.  Half our failures in business come from men attempting something they know nothing about.  A printer will open a drug store, and a country dry goods merchant will start a daily paper in a city!  “Alas!” says Young, “ambition makes my little less.”