[Footnote 1:  La Bruyere also says:—­“All mischief comes from our not being able to be alone; hence play, luxury, dissipation, wine, ignorance, calumny, envy, forgetfulness of one’s self and of God.”]

But the distinction is one without much difference; we need not labour it nor pay it further attention.  Aphorism or maxim, let us remember that this wisdom of life is the true salt of literature; that those books, at least in prose, are most nourishing which are most richly stored with it; and that it is one of the main objects, apart from the mere acquisition of knowledge, which men ought to seek in the reading of books.

A living painter has said, that the longer he works, the more does be realise how very little anybody except the trained artist actually perceives in the natural objects constantly before him; how blind men are to impressions of colour and light and form, which would be full of interest and delight, if people only knew how to see them.  Are not most of us just as blind to the thousand lights and shades in the men and women around us?  We live in the world as we live among fellow-inmates in a hotel, or fellow-revellers at a masquerade.  Yet this, to bring knowledge of ourselves and others “home to our business and our bosoms,” is one of the most important parts of culture.

Some prejudice is attached in generous minds to this wisdom of the world as being egotistical, poor, unimaginative, of the earth earthy.  Since the great literary reaction at the end of the last century, men have been apt to pitch criticism of life in the high poetic key.  They have felt with Wordsworth:—­

  “The human nature unto which I felt
  That I belonged, and reverenced with love,
  Was not a punctual presence, but a spirit
  Diffused through time and space, with aid derived
  Of evidence from monuments, erect,
  Prostrate, or leaning towards their common rest
  In earth, the widely-scattered wreck sublime
  Of vanished nations.”

Then again, there is another cause for the passing eclipse of interest in wisdom of the world.  Extraordinary advances have been made in ordered knowledge of the various stages of the long prehistoric dawn of human civilisation.  The man of the flint implement and the fire-drill, who could only count up to five, and who was content to live in a hut like a beehive, has drawn interest away from the man of the market and the parlour.  The literary passion for primitive times and the raw material of man has thrust polished man, the manufactured article, into a secondary place.  All this is in the order of things.  It is fitting enough that we should pierce into the origins of human nature.  It is right, too, that the poets, the ideal interpreters of life, should be dearer to us than those who stop short with mere deciphering of what is real and actual.  The poet has his own sphere of the beautiful and the sublime.  But it is no less true that the enduring weight of historian,