rn, as if under all dialects the partakers in
Graeco-Roman civilisation, whether in Athens, Rome, Paris, Weimar,
Edinburgh, London, Dublin, were not the heirs of a great common stock
of thought as well as of speech.

I certainly do not mean anything so absurd as that the moralities,
whether major or minor, whether affecting the foundation of conduct or
the surface of manners, remain fixed. On the contrary, one of the most
interesting things in literature is to mark the shifts and changes in
men's standards. For instance, Boswell tells a curious story of the
first occasion on which Johnson met Sir Joshua Reynolds. Two ladies of
the company were regretting the death of a friend to whom they owed
great obligations. Reynolds observed that they had at any rate the
comfort of being relieved from a debt of gratitude. The ladies were
naturally shocked at this singular alleviation of their grief, but
Johnson defended it in his clear and forcible manner, and, says
Boswell, "was much pleased with the mind, the fair view of human
nature, that it exhibited, like some of the reflections of
Rochefoucauld." On the strength of it he went home with Reynolds,
supped with him, and was his friend for life. No moralist with a
reputation to lose would like to back Reynolds's remark in the
nineteenth century.

Our own generation in Great Britain has been singularly unfortunate
in the literature of aphorism. One too famous volume of proverbial
philosophy had immense vogue, but it is so vapid, so wordy, so futile,
as to have a place among the books that dispense with parody. Then,
rather earlier in the century, a clergyman, who ruined himself by
gambling, ran away from his debts to America, and at last blew his
brains out, felt peculiarly qualified to lecture mankind on moral
prudence. He wrote a little book in 1820; called _Lacon; or Many
Things in Few Words, addressed to those who think_. It is an awful
example to anybody who is tempted to try his hand at an aphorism.
Thus, "Marriage is a feast where the grace is sometimes better than
the dinner." I had made some other extracts from this unhappy sage,
but you will thank me for having thrown them into the fire. Finally, a
great authoress of our time was urged by a friend to fill up a gap in
our literature by composing a volume of Thoughts: the result was that
least felicitous of performances, _Theophrastus Such_. One living
writer of genius has given us a little sheaf of subtly-pointed maxims