truest and purest moralist of his generation. His meditative mind concerned itself as much with the life that is as with the life to come, and he was spiritually drawn to a conception of religion which resolutely broke down the distinctions between righteousness and piety that men are forever trying to build up.

Penn was one of the most admirable writers of his generation, and when he put his thoughts on conduct into precepts, as in a little collection which he entitled "Fruits of Solitude," he gave many of them an almost perfect form.

"If thou thinkest twice," he wrote, " before thou speakest once, thou wilt speak twice the better for it."

Knowledge is the treasure, but judgment is the treasurer of a wise man.'

"Let nothing be lost, said our Saviour; but that is lost which is misused."

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Hospitality is good if the poorer sort are the subjects of our bounty."

"Never marry but for love; but see that thou lovest what is lovely."

"Seek not to be rich, but to be happy. The one lies in bags; the other in content."

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one.'

Nothing needs a trick but a trick. Sincerity loathes

Penn's little book of the "Fruits of Solitude" fell into the hands of Robert Louis Stevenson one day, at San Francisco, and delighted him so that he made it for a time his constant companion. At last he sent it to a London friend, with this note written in it: "If ever in all my human conduct' I have done a better thing to any fellow creature than handing on to you this sweet, dignified, and wholesome book, I know I shall hear of it on the last day. To write a book like this were impossi

ble; at least one can hand it on - with a wrench

one

to another. My wife cries out and my own heart misgives me, but still here it is. Even the copy was

dear to me, printed in the colony that Penn established, and carried in my pocket all about the San Francisco streets, read in street cars and ferry boats, when I was sick unto death, and found in all times and places a peaceful and sweet companion."

But the principles of right conduct were discussed in a broader and more influential way by Penn in the “Advice to his Children" which he published in 1699. As a treatise of practical ethics, spiritualized, or interfused with religious motive, I doubt if anything better can be found in literature.

When we arrive at the eighteenth century, we are at the opening of the new age of industry and politics through which the civilized world has been passing ever since the age, that is, of great progress in science, mechanism and democracy. At the beginning, at least, it was a most prosaic time, and the ideals in it were not high, which fact shows in nothing more plainly than in the moralizing of the age. Whoever it may be that undertakes to frame rules for himself, or to give advice to young or old, on conduct, or on the use of time, or on the management of life, the advice has seldom any thought but the wary thought of prudence behind it. Even Addison, when he attempts, in one of the essays of "The Spectator," to propose to people who are wasting the greater part of their existence," certain methods for filling up the empty spaces of their lives," drops into the veriest commonplaces, and makes it plain that either he cannot or dare not hold up to his readers the high conceptions of life, and duty, and good, and happiness, and self-cultivation, that would have suggested themselves to such a man,

on such an occasion, in many earlier times. Our own Franklin, thrifty, shrewdly forethoughtful, kindly, publicspirited, ever busy in doing good to all around him, but politic and practical in everything, and having no glimmer of idealism or spirituality in his mind, was the typical moralist, I should say, of his age. It would be unfair to the age to make Chesterfield its representative in this matter, though his letters to his son, in their frank worldliness, and in the earnestness of their plea for the surface polish to be put on behavior by polite manners, are very much in the spirit of their time. Lord Chatham wrote letters to his nephew that are on about the same level of suggestion, though inspired by far more of moral earnestness. Nearly the same is to be said of the excellent letters of advice which Washington and Jefferson addressed to young friends; and, indeed, it would be hardly reasonable to expect more from men even the greatest whose lives have been given, not to meditation, but to heroic and laborious deeds.

Even the supreme genius of Goethe was affected, in no slight degree, by the hardness and coldness in the temper of the eighteenth century. He was not a moralist; he had the larger wisdom of the great poet, realizing Matthew Arnold's definition of poetry, that it is a "criticism of life." He was, par excellence, the critic of life, from all view-points, including the moral. The abundant "Maxims and Reflections" that he left are rich in ethical suggestion; but they are not of the quality most inspired or inspiring. They never flash such a light on man and on the life of man as we get sometimes from the sayings of Marcus Aurelius, and from others whom I have quoted in this slight review. Yet there is great and valuable wisdom in them.

"Ingratitude," says Goethe, " is always a kind of weak

ness.

ful."

I have never known men of ability to be ungrate

"It is not enough to know, we must apply; it is not enough to will, we must also do."

"Perfection is the measure of heaven, and the wish to be perfect the measure of man."

"Use well the moment; what the hour
Brings for thy use is in thy power;
And what thou best canst understand,
Is just the thing lies nearest to thy hand."

"Art thou little, do that little well, and for thy comfort know,
The biggest man can do his biggest work no better than just so."

There is nothing more fundamental in the ethics of Goethe than the doctrine embodied in these last two injunctions. They convey one of the teachings with which Goethe most inspired Carlyle - -"Do the duty that lies nearest thee." In his cynical and vehement way, the latter took it up and made it ring into the ears of his own generation with a passion of eloquence that reverberates yet. “Produce! produce!" he cries, in "Sartor Resartus," "were it but the pitifulest infinitessimal fraction of a product, produce it in God's name! 'Tis the utmost thou hast in thee: out with it, then. Up, up! Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy whole might. Work while it is called To-day; for the Night cometh, wherein no man can work." It is an old gospel; but it came with wholesome force to the modern world from Goethe and Carlyle. So, too, did that other bitter-tonic doctrine, which both preached, that no man need think he has any right to happiness. It was an old annunciation even when the stoics found it; yet Carlyle startled our fathers, sixty years ago, and put no little new thinking into their minds, when he cried to them: "What act of Legislature was there that thou shouldst be Happy? A

little while ago thou hadst no right to be at all. What if thou wert born and predestined not to be Happy, but to be Unhappy! Art thou nothing other than a Vulture, then, that fliest through the Universe seeking after somewhat to eat, and shrieking dolefully because carrion enough is not given thee? Close thy Byron; open thy Goethe." As Carlyle cried "Produce, produce!" so Thoreau cried "Simplify, simplify life!" and he was scornful of the much-bragged-of work of the world. "As for work," he said, "we have n't any of any consequence. We have

the St. Vitus's dance, and cannot possibly keep our heads still." Now, put the two doctrines of practical living together, simplify life as Thoreau would have it, then do the duty that lies nearest, as Carlyle enjoins, and we have the groundwork, it seems to me, of the life best worth living.

No two men of our day have won more attention to their views of life than Carlyle and Thoreau on these two points of duty-work and of simplicity which they singled out for emphasis. Therefore I have quoted them in this connection, though they do not belong among the systematic preceptors whose maxims I have been discussing. Indeed, the counsellors and maxim-makers of that worldold school which dates from Ptah-hotep seem now to be disappearing. Men who meditate on Life and Conduct and Duty and Happiness seem no longer willing to attempt to pack their thoughts into a little bead-string of precepts and apothegms, or into the brevity of a letter of fatherly advice. It may be that life has widened so, and the considerations which bear on it have so multiplied, that they demand ampler and fuller treatment. At all events, whatever the cause, it is in rounded essays and many-chaptered books that the counsels for right and happy living have mostly been given of late years.