Some have found light in the sayings of Balthasar Gracian, a Spaniard, who flourished at the end of the seventeenth century, whose maxims were translated into English at the very beginning of the eighteenth, and who was introduced to the modern public in an excellent article by Sir M.E.  Grant Duff a few years ago.  The English title is attractive,—­The Art of Prudence, or a Companion for a Man of Sense.  I do not myself find Gracian much of a companion, though some of his aphorisms give a neat turn to a commonplace.  Thus:—­

  “The pillow is a dumb sibyl.  To sleep upon a thing
  that is to be done, is better than to be wakened up by
  one already done.”

  “To equal a predecessor one must have twice his
  worth.”

  “What is easy ought to be entered upon as though
  it were difficult, and what is difficult as though it were
  easy.”

  “Those things are generally best remembered which
  ought most to be forgot.  Not seldom the surest remedy
  of the evil consists in forgetting it.”

It is France that excels in the form no less than in the matter of aphorism, and for the good reason that in France the arts of polished society were relatively at an early date the objects of a serious and deliberate cultivation, such as was and perhaps remains unknown in the rest of Europe.  Conversation became a fine art.  “I hate war,” said one; “it spoils conversation.”  The leisured classes found their keenest relish in delicate irony, in piquancy, in contained vivacity, in the study of niceties of observation and finish of phrase.  You have a picture of it in such a play as Moliere’s Misanthropist, where we see a section of the polished life of the time—­men and women making and receiving compliments, discoursing on affairs with easy lightness, flitting backwards and forwards with a thousand petty hurries, and among them one singular figure, hoarse, rough, sombre, moving with a chilling reality in the midst of frolicking shadows.  But the shadows were all in all to one another.  Not a point of conduct, not a subtlety of social motive, escaped detection and remark.

Dugald Stewart has pointed to the richness of the French tongue in appropriate and discriminating expressions for varieties of intellectual turn and shade.  How many of us, who claim to a reasonable knowledge of French, will undertake easily to find English equivalents for such distinctions as are expressed in the following phrases—­Esprit juste, esprit etendu, esprit fin, esprit delie, esprit de lumiere.  These numerous distinctions are the evidence, as Stewart says, of the attention paid by the cultivated classes to delicate shades of mind and feeling.  Compare with them the colloquial use of our terribly overworked word “clever.”  Society and conversation have never been among us the school of reflection, the spring of literary inspiration, that they have been in France.  The English rule has rather been like that of the ancient Persians, that the great thing is to learn to ride, to shoot with the bow, and to speak the truth.  There is much in it.  But it has been more favourable to strength than to either subtlety or finish.