SOME NEW APHORISMS.

TT is not very easy to explain the attractiveness which un- doubtedly belongs to worldly-wise aphorisms. People, as a rule, are a little impatient of being taught worldly wisdom in any direct or preachy fashion, and resent advice which impugns their judgment and knowledge of mankind much more than exhorta- tions which only imply distrust of their consciences or their hearts. Congregations will listen patiently, though with a little weariness,

to discourses on the Eighth Commandment, if the preacher is not too severe on "trickeries of trade," but they would actively resent a lecture intended to teach them not to be silly and not to be taken in. Sons hear the maternal petition that they will be good and up- right with something of respect, and sympathise when the father says they must be always gentlemen, but adqice to choose only the right associates and to avoid quarrels very soon elicits visible and audible evidences of fidget. We cannot recall a book full of worldly teaching—and hundreds of such have been pub- lished—which ever made a deep impression on mankind, nor any lecture, or sermon, or essay which has distinctly helped to make any class of men more shrewd. Yet no one will dispute that worldly- wise teaching embodied in aphorisms has in repeated instances greatly influenced mankind, and in many has attracted such admira- tion from the cultivated that the book containing it has survived most books of its generation. " 2Esop's Fables," a collection of worldly-wise maxims pleasantly disguised, has come down through the ages, and we fear the bourgeois wisdom embodied in Solomon's Proverbs, some of which are almost cunning in their counsel, has contributed greatly to the preservation of that collection, which is now, though, unless we are greatly mistaken, slowly slipping out of the general memory. Rochefoucauld's maxims have been the delight of the cultivated for two hundred years, and so, though for a shorter period, have been some of the most cynical sayings of Talleyrand and the later French wits. This is not because they are true. A great many of Rochefoucauld's maxims and of more recent writers' jests are distinctly false, as false as Douglas Jerrold's bright aphorism that "dogmatism is puppyism full grown ;" but they seem true to men whom much reflection on the hollowness of things in the world, on the roads by which success is achieved, and on the " mess" ingenuous youth often makes of its own career, have made a little cynical. They do not stop to consider the morality of the dicta they are reading, but only enjoy the bitter flavour of so much worldly experience boiled down into a sentence. One does not think of digestion when one is eating vanille. The delightful series of aphorisms, for example, just published by Mr. Grant Duff in the Fortnightly, will, to hundreds of palates, be the most appetising things in the whole number ; yet very few of them are quite true, and some of them positively and demonstrably false. These aphorisms were, in fact, the delight of Schopenhauer, and though Schopenhauer's pessimist philosophy has few admirers in England, and no followers —for Mr. Oxenford, who revealed his writings to the world, was no disciple—every experienced man has in him at moments of disappointment a trace of Schopenhauer, and is inclined to think, with him, that being and suffering are identical. The aphorisms are the work of Balthazar Grecian, a Spanish Jesuit, born in 1584, who died a schoolmaster, but who must have watched men and manners very narrowly ; and as Mr. Grant Duff admits, a proportion of them are just what we should ex- pect from a subtly observant Spanish Jesuit, wisdom tainted with a liking for insincerity, and a conviction that men require to be managed by subtle art. These, for example, are either directly immoral in their inner meaning, or full of a wisdom hardly to be distinguished from bad cunning :— " Know how to play the card of truth.—It is a dangerous thing, yet the honest man cannot omit to speak it, but in saying it art is wanted."

"Leave people in uncertainty about your purposes.— Imitate the heavenly powers in keeping men full of speculation and unrest."

"Find every man's thumbscrew.— All are idolaters—some of

honour, some of interest, some of pleasure Have the knack of knowing what their idols are, so as to affect each through his idol."

"Think with the few, and speak with the many."

"Allow yourself some venialfault.— Let Homer sleep now and

then, and affect a want of care either in intellect or in valour, but never in prudence, in order that you may lull malevolence, and so prevent it bursting with its own poison. That will be like throwing your cloak to the bull of Envy, so as to save your immortality."

"Take care not to attain victories over your superior.—All conquest is detested, and to conquer your master is either a folly or a calamity. All superiority is abominated : how much more superiority over superiority."

"Push advantages.— Let the prudent man strike down

his quarry, and not be satisfied merely with flushing it."

"Better be mad with everybody else than prudent alone.—So say poli- ticians. For if all are mad one is not behind anybody else, and if the prudent man is alone be will pass for mad, so important it is to follow the current. Sometimes the greatest wisdom lies in ignorance, or the affectation of it. We have got to live with others, and the ignorant are in the majority. To live alone one must be very like a god or quite like a beast ; yet I would modify the aphorism, and say, better be prudent with the majority than mad by one's self. There are some people who seek for originality in chimeras and crotchets."

The majority of Gracian's aphorisms are, however, neither bad nor good, but only sentences giving, in the fewest possible wordzs

the results of long experience and reflection. Grecian lived centuries before the discovery of electricity, but he would smile to see how thronghly intriguing politicians and bulletin-compilers and daily journalists anxious for a party or a " view" have learned to act upon this sentence :—

" Do not be the slave of first impressions.—There are people who marry the very first account they hear, so that all the accounts that follow come to them only as concubines."

Moore used the same image to describe some of the eccentricities of fanaticism, but the Spaniard's apophthegm is of more present

value :—

"For faith, fanatic faith, once wedded fast To some dear falsehood, hugs it to the last."

Faith is not the foible of our day ; but the belief in telegrams sent only to create an invincible first impression, is. What subtle modern wisdom, too, there is in this ! and what, again, would its value be to many politicialls ?—

" Know how to play the card of contempt.— It is a firm

maxim of the wise never to defend themselves with the pen, for such a defence leaves a mark, and tends more to the glorification of the opponent than to the punishment of his boldness Presumptuous persons dream of making themselves eternal by setting fire to the wonders of the world and of the centuries."

Imagine, too, the gain to mankind, if all statesmen could follow this advice, and Gambetta cease to be French in his foibles,

or Bismarck German in his manners, or Mr. Gladstone Scotch in his perfervidum ingenium I.—

" Avoid the faults of your nation.—Water shares in the good or bad 'qualities of the veins through which it passes, and a man in those of the clime in which he is born There are family faults and faults of position, faults of office and faults of age. If they all moot in

• one person, and are not opposed by attention, they make an intolerable monster."

And yet granted that advance in statesmen, what would become of representative government ? The people would cease to under- stand their rulers. The great ones of the earth just now, Bismarck first of all, and after him every leader more or less, are forgetting this maxim :— " Keep ministering spirits.—That is a privilege of the great ones of the earth which far transcends the barbarous taste of Tigranes, who

had a fancy for having captive kings as his servants If, however, you cannot have sages in your service, have them for your friends."

And too many of the great, and more journalists, forget also this, "Overcome your antipathies," of all sources of error in modern society,—which day by day becomes more like life on shipboard, —that which most utterly misdirects the judgment. There are few statesmen, Bismarck again being foremost of them, who would not be better for remembering this remonstrance against the smallest, the most common, and the most injurious of the foibles a the great :— " Work with good instwonents.—Some are anxious that the keenness and subtlety of their wits should be conspicuous through the meanness of their instruments—a perilous satisfaction which deserves a punishment

from Fate Fame always holds to the first personage. She never says, 'He had good or he had bad assistants,' but 'he was a good or he was a bad artificer."

Midhat forgot this counsel :—

" Have a stomach able to digest great mouthfuls of fortune."

Lord Melbourne never read Grecian, but here is his own philo- sophy summed up in a sentence, longer, it is true, than the cele- brated query in which he embodied his philosophy, and with which he disconcerted officious colleagues :— " Do not make a business of what is no business.—. . Many

things which were really of some importance have become of none 'because they were left alone ; and other things which were of no im- portance have become grave because people have occupied themselves about them. At the beginning everything can be easily quieted down, but afterwards not. It is frequently the remedy that causes the disease, and not the worst rule of living is to let it alone."

And what might not Lord Derby become, if all his common- sense were shot like silk with this invaluable advice !—

" A grain of boldness in everything is an important requisite of pru-

dence.— We should moderate our conceptions of others so as not to think so highly of them as to fear them. The imagination

should ne•fer overmaster the heart No one overpasses the narrow limits of humanity. All have their imperfections, some in the -intellect, some in the disposition."

A few of Gracian's sayings are valuable merely for their wise- ness. We have heard the advice to "suffer fools" before, and the following sentence, strange to say, is contained, though in other words, in the new edition of the Ten Commandments advocated by the authors of "Ready-Money Mortiboy,"—

" Know how to transplant yourself.— Their native land is

everywhere stepmotherly towards extraordinary talents,"

—though their notion was that England was stepmotherly to poverty ; and we fear too few Englishmen need this advice, "Do not become bad out of pure goodness. He is so who never gets angry." But this is new, and is a proof of most curiously attentive observation :—

" Do not listen to yourself.— It is a weakness of the great to speak with a grand tone of ' I say something worth hearing,' to the torture of their hearers."

Mr. Grant Duff will, we hope, one day give us the whole of Gracian's sayings, for in the hundred or so he has picked out we have found but one that is poor :— "Be common in nothing, above all, not in taste.—Oh, what a great wise man he was who was wretched when what he said pleased the multi- tude!"

But then Gmcian lived before penny journals, and the passion for notoriety.