CHAPTER XXIII.
THE REWARD OF PERSISTENCE Every noble work is at first impossible .-- CARLYLE.
Victory belongs to the most persevering .-- NAPOLEON.
Success in most things depends on knowing how long it takes to succeed .-- MONTESQUIEU.
Perpetual pushing and assurance put a difficulty out of countenance, and make a seeming impossibility give way .-- JEREMY COLLIER.
"Unstable as water, thou shalt not excel." The nerve that never relaxes, the eye that never blanches, the thought that never wanders,--these are the masters of victory .-- BURKE.
"The pit rose at me!" exclaimed Edmund Kean in a wild tumult of emotion, as he rushed home to his trembling wife.

"Mary, you shall ride in your carriage yet, and Charles shall go to Eton!" He had been so terribly in earnest with the study of his profession that he had at length made a mark on his generation.

He was a little dark man with a voice naturally harsh, but he determined, when young, to play the character of Sir Giles Overreach, in Massinger's drama, as no other man had ever played it.

By a persistency that nothing seemed able to daunt, he so trained himself to play the character that his success, when it did come, was overwhelming, and all London was at his feet.
"I am sorry to say that I don't think this is in your line," said Woodfall the reporter, after Sheridan had made his first speech in Parliament.

"You would better have stuck to your former pursuits." With head on his hand Sheridan mused for a time, then looked up and said, "It is in me, and it shall come out of me." From the same man came that harangue against Warren Hastings which the orator Fox called the best speech ever made in the House of Commons.
"I had no other books than heaven and earth, which are open to all," said Bernard Palissy, who left his home in the south of France in 1828, at the age of eighteen.