day a gentleman wrote to me to give him by return
of post that far more difficult thing--list of the three best books in
the world. Both the hundred and the three are a task far too high for
me; but perhaps you will let me try to indicate what, among so much
else, is one of the things best worth hunting for in books, and one
of the quarters of the library where you may get on the scent. Though
tranquil, it will be my fault if you find the hour dull, for this
particular literary chapter concerns life, manners, society, conduct,
human nature, our aims, our ideals, and all besides that is most
animated and most interesting in man's busy chase after happiness and
wisdom.

What is wisdom? That sovereign word, as has often been pointed out, is
used for two different things. It may stand for knowledge, learning,
science, systematic reasoning; or it may mean, as Coleridge has
defined it, common sense in an uncommon degree; that is to say, the
unsystematic truths that come to shrewd, penetrating, and observant
minds, from their own experience of life and their daily commerce with
the world, and that is called the wisdom of life, or the wisdom of the
world, or the wisdom of time and the ages. The Greeks had two words
for these two kinds of wisdom: one for the wise who scaled the heights
of thought and knowledge; another for those who, without logical
method, technical phraseology, or any of the parade of the Schools,
whether "Academics old and new, Cynic, Peripatetic, the sect
Epicurean, or Stoic severe," held up the mirror to human nature, and
took good counsel as to the ordering of character and of life.

Mill, in his little fragment on Aphorisms, has said that in the first
kind of wisdom every age in which science flourishes ought to surpass
the ages that have gone before. In knowledge and methods of science
each generation starts from the point at which its predecessor left
off; but in the wisdom of life, in the maxims of good sense applied to
public and to private conduct, there is, said Mill, a pretty nearly
equal amount in all ages.

If this seem doubtful to any one, let him think how many of the
shrewdest moralities of human nature are to be found in writings as
ancient as the apocryphal Book of the Wisdom of Solomon and of Jesus
the Son of Sirach; as _Aesop's Fables_; as the oracular sentences that
are to be found in Homer and the Greek dramatists and orators; as
all that immense host of wise and pithy saws which, to