y judge;
Be sure that thou no brother-mortal hate,
Then all besides leave to the Master Power."

If any of you should be bitten with an unhappy passion for the
composition of aphorisms, let me warn such an one that the power of
observing life is rare, the power of drawing new lessons from it is
rarer still, and the power of condensing the lesson in a pointed
sentence is rarest of all. Beware of cultivating this delicate art.
The effort is only too likely to add one more to that perverse
class described by Gibbon, who strangle a thought in the hope of
strengthening it, and applaud their own skill when they have shown
in a few absurd words the fourth part of an idea. Let me warmly urge
anybody with so mistaken an ambition, instead of painfully distilling
poor platitudes of his own, to translate the shrewd saws of the wise
browed Goethe.

Some have found light in the sayings of Balthasar Gracian, a Spaniard,
who flourished at the end of the seventeenth century, whose maxims
were translated into English at the very beginning of the eighteenth,
and who was introduced to the modern public in an excellent article
by Sir M.E. Grant Duff a few years ago. The English title is
attractive,--_The Art of Prudence, or a Companion for a Man of Sense_.
I do not myself find Gracian much of a companion, though some of his
aphorisms give a neat turn to a commonplace. Thus:--

"The pillow is a dumb sibyl. To sleep upon a thing
that is to be done, is better than to be wakened up by
one already done."

"To equal a predecessor one must have twice his
worth."

"What is easy ought to be entered upon as though
it were difficult, and what is difficult as though it were
easy."

"Those things are generally best remembered which
ought most to be forgot. Not seldom the surest remedy
of the evil consists in forgetting it."

It is France that excels in the form no less than in the matter of
aphorism, and for the good reason that in France the arts of polished
society were relatively at an early date the objects of a serious and
deliberate cultivation, such as was and perhaps remains unknown in the
rest of Europe. Conversation became a fine art. "I hate war," said
one; "it spoils conversation." The leisured classes found their
keenest relish in delicate irony, in piquancy, in contained vivacity,
in the study of niceties of observation and finish of phrase. You have
a picture of it in such a play as Moliere's _Misanth