ins of thy birth and the care for thy education that thy
mother lavished on thee, that her anger may not rise up against thee,
and that she lift not her hands to God, for he will hear her complaint!"
The whole of the book does not rise to this level, but we find in it
several maxims which appear to be popular proverbs, as for instance: "He
who hates idleness will come without being called;" "A good walker comes
to his journey's end without needing to hasten;" or, "The ox which
goes at the head of the flock and leads the others to pasture is but an
animal like his fellows." Towards the end, the son Khonshotpu, weary of
such a lengthy exhortation to wisdom, interrupts his father roughly:
"Do not everlastingly speak of thy merits, I have heard enough of thy
deeds;" whereupon Ani resignedly restrains himself from further speech,
and a final parable gives us the motive of his resignation: "This is the
likeness of the man who knows the strength of his arm. The nursling who
is in the arms of his mother cares only for being suckled; but no sooner
has he found his mouth than he cries: 'Give me bread!'"

It is, perhaps, difficult for us to imagine an Egyptian in love
repeating madrigals to his mistress,* for we cannot easily realise that
the hard and blackened bodies we see in our museums have once been men
and women loving and beloved in their own day.

* The remains of Egyptian amatory literature have been
collected, translated, and commentated on by Maspero. They
have been preserved in two papyri, one of which is at Turin,
the other in the British Museum. The first of these appears
to be a sort of dialogue in which the trees of a garden
boast one after another of the beauty of a woman, and
discourse of the love-scenes which took place under their
shadow.

The feeling which they entertained one for another had none of the
reticence or delicacy of our love: they went straight to the point, and
the language in which, they expressed themselves is sometimes too coarse
for our taste. The manners and customs of daily life among the Egyptians
tended to blunt in them the feelings of modesty and refinement to which
our civilization has accustomed us. Their children went about without
clothes, or, at any rate, wore none until the age of puberty. Owing to
the climate, both men and women left the upper part of the body more or
less uncovered, or wore fabrics of a transparent nature. In the towns,