Horace’s Epistles are a mine of genial, friendly, humane observation.  Then there is none of the ancient moralists to whom the modern, from Montaigne, Charron, Ralegh, Bacon, downwards, owe more than to Seneca.  Seneca has no spark of the kindly warmth of Horace; he has not the animation of Plutarch; he abounds too much in the artificial and extravagant paradoxes of the Stoics.  But, for all that, he touches the great and eternal commonplaces of human occasion—­friendship, health, bereavement, riches, poverty, death—­with a hand that places him high among the wise masters of life.  All through the ages men tossed in the beating waves of circumstance have found more abundantly in the essays and letters of Seneca than in any other secular writer words of good counsel and comfort.  And let this fact not pass, without notice of the light that it sheds on the fact of the unity of literature, and of the absurdity of setting a wide gulf between ancient or classical literature and modern, 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.