There are minds that run to maxims as Messrs. Holloway and Beecham ran to pills.  From the fields and mines of experience they cull their secret ingredients, concentrate them in the alembic of wit, mould them into compact and serviceable form, and put them upon the market of publicity for the universal benefit of mankind.  Such essence of wisdom will surely cure all ills; such maxims must be worth a guinea a box.  When the wise and the worldly have condensed their knowledge and observation into portable shape, why go further and pay more for a medicine of the soul, or, indeed, for the soul’s sustenance?  Pills, did we say?  Are there not tabloids that supply the body with oxygen, hydrogen, calorics, or whatever else is essential to life in the common hundredweights and gallons of bread, meat, and drink?  Why not feed our souls on maxims, like those who spread the board for courses of a bovril lozenge apiece, two grains of phosphorus, three of nitrogen, one of saccharine, a dewdrop of alcohol, and half a scruple of caffeine to conclude?

It is a stimulating thought, encouraging to economy of time and space.  We read to acquire wisdom, and no one grudges zeal in that pursuit.  But still, the time spent upon it, especially in our own country, is what old journalists used to call “positively appalling,” and in some books, perhaps, we may draw blank.  Read only maxims, and in the twinkling of an eye you catch the thing that you pursue.  It is not “Wisdom while you wait”; there is no waiting at all.  It is a “lightning lunch,” a “kill” without the risk and fatigue of hunting.  The find and the death are simultaneous.  And as to space, a poacher’s pocket will hold your library; where now the sewers of Bloomsbury crack beneath the accumulating masses of superfluous print, one single shelf will contain all that man needs to know; and Mr. Carnegie’s occupation will be gone.

For these reasons, one heartily welcomes Messrs. Methuen’s re-issue of an old and excellent translation of Rochefoucauld’s Maxims, edited by Mr. George Powell.  The book is a little large for tabloids.  It runs to nearly two hundred pages, and it might have been more conveniently divided by ten or even by a hundred.  But still, as Rochefoucauld is the very medicine-man of maxims, we will leave it at that.  He united every quality of the moral and intellectual pill-doctor.  He lived in an artificial and highly intellectualised society.  He was a contemporary and friend of great wits.  He haunted salons, and was graciously received by perceptive ladies, who never made a boredom of virtue.  He mingled in a chaos of political intrigue, and was involved in burlesque rebellion.  He was intimate with something below the face-value of public men, and he used the language that Providence made for maxims.  But, above all, he had the acid or tang of poison needed to make the true, the medicinal maxim.  His present editor compares him with Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, and Bacon—­great names,