CHAPTER V


Fortune, we are told, is a blind and fickle foster-mother, who showers
her gifts at random upon her nurslings. But we do her a grave injustice
if we believe such an accusation. Trace a man's career from his cradle
to his grave and mark how Fortune has treated him. You will find that
when he is once dead she can for the most part be vindicated from the
charge of any but very superficial fickleness. Her blindness is the
merest fable; she can espy her favourites long before they are born. We
are as days and have had our parents for our yesterdays, but through all
the fair weather of a clear parental sky the eye of Fortune can discern
the coming storm, and she laughs as she places her favourites it may be
in a London alley or those whom she is resolved to ruin in kings'
palaces. Seldom does she relent towards those whom she has suckled
unkindly and seldom does she completely fail a favoured nursling.

Was George Pontifex one of Fortune's favoured nurslings or not? On the
whole I should say that he was not, for he did not consider himself so;
he was too religious to consider Fortune a deity at all; he took whatever
she gave and never thanked her, being firmly convinced that whatever he
got to his own advantage was of his own getting. And so it was, after
Fortune had made him able to get it.

"Nos te, nos facimus, Fortuna, deam," exclaimed the poet. "It is we who
make thee, Fortune, a goddess"; and so it is, after Fortune has made us
able to make her. The poet says nothing as to the making of the "nos."
Perhaps some men are independent of antecedents and surroundings and have