over these pages of old time," says

Morley, we almost feel that those are

right who tell us that everything has been said, that the thing that has been is the thing that shall be, and there is no new thing under the sun."

We are admonished, however, that few of these maxims are to be taken without qualification. "They seek sharpness of impression by excluding one side of the matter and exaggerating another, and most aphorisms are to be read as subject to all sorts of limits, conditions, and corrections." (I may remind the reader that this was written ten years or more after what I have quoted above from my lecture of 1877.)

"Grammarians,"

as Morley re

marks, "draw a distinction between a

maxim and an aphorism, and tell us

that, while an aphorism only states some broad truth of general bearing, a maxim, besides stating the truth, enjoins a rule of conduct as its consequence;" but, as he adds, the distinction is one without much difference, and not worthy of further attention.

The Century Dictionary, in dealing with the synonyms, makes a similar distinction by saying that the aphorism "relates rather to speculative principles... than to practical matters;" " while the maxim "suggests a lesson more pointedly and directly;" and the precept is "a direct injunction." Yet, in its definition of the aphorism, it is said to be "a precept or rule expressed in few words." It distinguishes the apothegm as being "in common matters what the aph

orism is in higher," while some authorities make the distinction the

exact opposite of this.

lish Dictionary states

The New Eng

that the apo

thegm "embodies an important truth in few words," or is "a pithy or sententious maxim;" while the aphorism (as quoted above) is "any principle or precept" in few words, or "a maxim."

If the reader chooses to look up other definitions of this group of words, he will find the confusion only the worse confounded. The lexicographers treat the terms as loosely as common folk do-or the cultivated and literary, for that matter. Have done with all such "tweedle-dum and tweedle-dee" wordmongering!

"Aphorism or maxim," as Morley says after his page of comment on the

definitions," 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 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."

Elsewhere he says: "It is right 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, moralist, political orator, or preacher depends on the amount of the wisdom of life that is hived in his pages. They may be admirable by virtue of other

qualities, by learning, by grasp, by majesty of flight; but it is his moral sentences on mankind or the State that rank the prose writer among the sages."

Morley goes on to refer to great authors who belong to this class: to Plutarch, whose Lives "are the pasture of great souls,' as they were called by one who was herself a great soul; to Thucydides, because of "the wise sentences that are sown with apt but not unsparing hand through the progress of the story;" to Horace, whose Epistles are "a mine of genial, friendly, humane observation;" to Seneca, who, notwithstanding his faults and defects, "touches the great and eternal commonplaces of human occasion-friendship, health, bereavement, riches, poverty, death-with a