Behold him now in the parental state, when surrounded by helpless children craving his support and looking to him for bread.  He is as bold, as vigilant, and as fawning, too, as the faithful dog; guarding his little flock, and snatching at everything that comes in his way, in order to provide for his offspring.

At last comes the final stage, when the decrepit old man, like the unwieldy though most sagacious elephant, becomes grave, sedate, and distrustful.  He then also begins to hang down his head towards the ground, as if surveying the place where all his vast schemes must terminate, and where ambition and vanity are finally humbled to the dust.

* * * * *

But the Talmudist, in his turn, was forestalled by Bhartrihari, an ancient Hindu sage, one of whose three hundred apothegms has been thus rendered into English by Sir Monier Williams: 

  Now for a little while a child; and now
  An amorous youth; then for a season turned
  Into a wealthy householder; then, stripped
  Of all his riches, with decrepit limbs
  And wrinkled frame, man creeps towards the end
  Of life’s erratic course; and, like an actor,
  Passes behind Death’s curtain out of view.

Here, however, the Indian philosopher describes human life as consisting of only four scenes; but, like our own Shakspeare, he compares the world to a stage and man to a player.  An epigram preserved in the Anthologia also likens the world to a theatre and human life to a drama: 

  This life a theatre we well may call,
    Where every actor must perform with art;
  Or laugh it through, and make a farce of all,
    Or learn to bear with grace a tragic part.

It is surely both instructive and interesting thus to discover resemblances in thought and expression in the writings of men of comprehensive intellect, who lived in countries and in times far apart.

VI

WISE SAYINGS OF THE RABBIS.

“Concise sentences,” says Bacon, “like darts, fly abroad and make impressions, while long discourses are flat things, and not regarded.”  And Seneca has remarked that “even rude and uncultivated minds are struck, as it were, with those short but weighty sentences which anticipate all reasoning by flashing truths upon them at once.”  Wise men in all ages seem to have been fully aware of the advantage of condensing into pithy sentences the results of their observations of the course of human life; and the following selection of sayings of the Jewish Fathers, taken from the Pirke Aboth (the 41st treatise of the Talmud, compiled by Nathan of Babylon, A.D. 200), and other sources, will be found to be quite as sagacious as the aphorisms of the most celebrated philosophers of India and Greece: 

This world is like an ante-chamber in comparison with the world to come; prepare thyself in the ante-chamber, therefore, that thou mayest enter into the dining-room.