No man is so good but there is a flaw in him, nor so bad as to be
    good for nothing.

    Middling wise should every man be; never overwise.  Those who know
    many things rarely lead the happiest life.

    Middling wise should every man be; never overwise.  No man should
    know his fate beforehand; so shall he live freest from care.

    Middling wise should every man be, never too wise.  A wise man’s
    heart is seldom glad, if its owner be a true sage.

This is the ancient wisdom also of Solomon “He that increases wisdom increases sorrow.”  But how very true as worldly wisdom these little Northern sentences are.  That a man who knows a little of many things, and no one thing perfectly, is the happiest man—­this certainly is even more true to-day than it was a thousand years ago.  Spencer has well observed that the man who can influence his generation, is never the man greatly in advance of his time, but only the man who is very slightly better than his fellows.  The man who is very superior is likely to be ignored or disliked.  Mediocrity can not help disliking superiority; and as the old Northern sage declared, “the average of men is but moiety.”  Moiety does not mean necessarily mediocrity, but also that which is below mediocrity.  What we call in England to-day, as Matthew Arnold called it, the Philistine element, continues to prove in our own time, to almost every superior man, the danger of being too wise.

Interesting in another way, and altogether more agreeable, are the old sayings about friendship:  “Know this, if thou hast a trusty friend, go and see him often; because a road which is seldom trod gets choked with brambles and high grass.”

    Be not thou the first to break off from thy friend.  Sorrow will
    eat thy heart if thou lackest the friend to open thy heart to.

    Anything is better than to be false; he is no friend who
    only speaks to please.

Which means, of course, that a true friend is not afraid to find fault with his friend’s course; indeed, that is his solemn duty.  But these teachings about friendship are accompanied with many cautions; for one must be very careful in the making friends.  The ancient Greeks had a terrible proverb:  “Treat your friend as if he should become some day your enemy; and treat your enemy as if he might some day become your friend.”  This proverb seems to me to indicate a certain amount of doubt in human nature.  We do not find this doubt in the Norse teaching, but on the contrary, some very excellent advice.  The first thing to remember is that friendship is sacred:  “He that opens his heart to another mixes blood with him.”  Therefore one should be very careful either about forming or about breaking a friendship.

    A man should be a friend to his friend’s friend.  But no man should
    be a friend of his friend’s foe, nor of his foe’s friend.