ness. I have never known men of ability to be ungrateful.” "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 "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. These books I will not open, but end my hasty survey here. I end it with a deepened conviction that the knowledge of Good and Evil has been complete in the world from the beginning of history, and that mankind has had nothing to learn since but the application of it. THE OLDEST BOOK IN THE WORLD SOME account of the discovery of the papyrus containing the precepts of Ptah-hotep, and of the conclusions reached by Egyptologists with regard to the period of antiquity from which it has come down, are given in the introductory essay. Among the eminent scholars who have devoted time and labor to the decipherment and study of the papyrus, M. Philippe Virey appears to have been the most patient. The results of his "Études sur le Papyrus Prisse," begun in 1881, were published at Paris in 1887. Three years later he contributed an English translation of the "Precepts of Ptah-hotep" to the third volume of Professor Sayce's "Records of the Past, " from which translation the following selection of a few among the precepts is taken. A SELECTION FROM THE PRECEPTS OF PTAH-HOTEP. (From "Records of the Past," edited by A. H. Sayce, N. S., V. 3.) Precepts of the prefect the feudal lord Ptah-hotep, under the majesty of the king of the South and North, Assa, living eternally forever. The prefect, the feudal lord Ptah-hotep says: O God with the two crocodiles, my lord, the progress of age changes into senility. Decay falls [upon man] and decline takes the place of youth. A vexation weighs upon him every day; sight fails; the ear becomes deaf; his strength dissolves without ceasing. The mouth is silent, speech fails him; the mind decays, remembering not the day before. The whole body suffers. That which is good becomes evil; taste completely disappears. Old age makes a man altogether miserable; the nose is stopped up, breath ing no more from exhaustion. Standing or sitting there is here a condition (?) of . Who will cause me to have authority to speak? that I may declare to him the words of those who have heard the counsels of former days? And the counsels heard of the gods, who (will give me authority to declare them?) Cause that it be so and that evil be removed from those that are enlightened ; send the double .. The majesty of this god says: Instruct him in the sayings of former days. It is this which constitutes the merit of the children of the great. All that which makes the soul equal penetrates him who hears it, and that which it says produces no satiety. Beginning of the arrangement of the good saying(s), spoken by the noble lord, the divine father, beloved of God, the son of the king, the first-born of his race, the prefect (and) feudal lord Ptah-hotep, so as to instruct the ignorant in the knowledge of the arguments of the good saying(s). It is profitable for him who hears them, it is a loss to him who shall transgress them. He says to his son: Be not arrogant because of that which thou knowest; deal with the ignorant as with the learned; for the barriers of art are not closed, no artist being in possession of the perfection to which he should aspire. [But] good (words) are more difficult to find than the emerald, for it is by slaves that that is discovered among the rocks of pegmatite. If thou findest a disputant while he is hot, and if he is superior to thee in ability, lower the hands, bend the back, do not get into a passion with him. As he will not let thee destroy his words, it is utterly wrong to interrupt him; that proclaims that thou art incapable of keeping thyself calm when thou art contradicted. If, then, thou hast to do with a disputant while he is |