THEOPHRASTUS

To A man who at a feast was persistently silent, he remarked, "If you are ignorant, you are acting wisely; if you are intelligent, you are behaving foolishly."

DEMETRIUS

IT WAS a saying of his that to friends in prosperity we should go when invited, but to those in misfortune unbidden.

When told that the Athenians had thrown down his statues, he answered, "But not my character, for which they erected them."

ANTISTHENES

SOME one asked him what he gained from philosophy. replied, "The power to converse with myself."

He

He advised the Athenians to pass a vote that asses were horses. When they thought that irrational, he said, "But certainly, your generals are not such because they have learned anything, but simply because you have elected them!"

DIOGENES

HE USED to say that when in the course of his life he saw pilots, and physicians, and philosophers, he thought man the most. sensible of animals; but when he saw interpreters of dreams, and soothsayers, and those who paid attention to them, and those puffed up by fame or wealth, he believed no creature was sillier than man.

Take life easy

Some said to him, "You are an old man. now." He replied, "And if I were running the long-distance race, should I when nearing the goal slacken, and not rather exert myself?"

When he saw a child drink out of his hands, he took the cup out of his wallet and flung it away, saying, "A child has beaten me in simplicity."

He used to argue thus, "All things belong to the gods. The wise are the friends of the gods. The goods of friends are common property. Therefore all things belong to the wise."

To one who argued that motion was impossible, he made no answer, but rose and walked away.

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When the Athenians urged him to be initiated into the Mysteries, assuring him that in Hades those who were initiated have the front seats, he replied, "It is ludicrous, if Agesilaus and Epaminondas are to abide in the mud, and some ignoble wretches who are initiated are to dwell in the Isles of the Blest!"

Plato made the definition "Man is a two-footed featherless animal," and was much praised for it. Diogenes plucked a fowl and brought it into his school, saying "This is Plato's man!" So the addition was made to the definition, "with broad nails." When a man asked him what was the proper hour for lunch, he said, "If you are rich, when you please; if you are poor, when you can get it.”

He used often to shout aloud that an easy life had been given by the gods to men, but they had covered it from sight in their search for honey-cakes and perfumes and such things.

The musician who was always left alone by his hearers he greeted with "Good morning, cock! When the other asked him the reason, he said, "Because your music starts everybody up."

When an exceedingly superstitious man said to him, "With one blow I will break your head!" he retorted, "And with a sneeze at your left side I will make you tremble."

When asked what animal had the worst bite, he said, "Of wild beasts, the sycophant; and of tame creatures, the flatterer." Being asked when was the proper time to marry, he responded, "For young men, not yet; and for old men, not at all."

When he was asked what sort of wine he enjoyed drinking, he answered, "Another man's." [Of a different temper was Dante, who knew too well "how salt the bread of others tastes!"]

Some one advised him to hunt up his runaway slave. But he replied, "It is ridiculous if Manes lives without Diogenes, but Diogenes cannot without Manes."

When asked why men give to beggars, but not to philosophers, he said, "Because they expect themselves to become lame and blind; but philosophers, never!

CLEANTHES

WHEN a comic actor apologized for having ridiculed him from the stage, he answered gently, "It would be preposterous, when

Bacchus and Hercules bear the raillery of the poets without showing any anger, if I should be indignant when I chance to be attacked."

PYTHAGORAS

Precepts

Do NOT stir the fire with a sword.

Do not devour your heart.

Always have your bed packed up.

Do not walk in the main street.

Do not cherish birds with crooked talons.

Avoid a sharp sword.

When you travel abroad, look not back at your own borders.

[Diogenes explains this: be resigned to death.]

Consider nothing exclusively your own.

Destroy no cultivated tree, or harmless animal.

Modesty and decorum consist in never yielding to laughter,

and yet not looking stern. [Cf. Emerson on Manners.]

Translated for A Library of the World's Best Literature,' by William C.

Lawton.

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ISAAC D'ISRAELI

(1766-1848)

MONG the writers whose education and whose tastes were the outcome of the classicism of the eighteenth century, yet

whose literary life lapped over into the Victorian epoch, was Isaac D'Israeli, born at Enfield in May 1766. D'Israeli was of Jewish origin, his ancestors having fled from the Spanish persecutions of the fifteenth century to find a home in Venice, whence a younger branch migrated to England.

At the time of his birth his family had stood for generations among the foremost English Jews, his father having been made a citizen by special legislation. The boy, however, did not inherit the commercial spirit which had established his house. He was a lover of books and a dreamer of dreams, and so early developed literary tendencies that his frightened father sent him off to Amsterdam to school, in the hope of curing proclivities so dangerous. Here he became familiar with the works of the Encyclopædists, and adopted the theories of Rousseau. On returning to England in his nineteenth year, he replied to his father's proposition that he should enter a commercial house at Bordeaux, by a long poem in which he passionately inveighed against the commercial spirit, and avowed himself a student of philosophy and letters. His father's reluctant acquiescence was obtained at last through the good offices of the laureate Pye, to whom the youth had already dedicated his first book, 'A Defence of Poetry.'

ISAAC D'ISRAELI

At the outset of his career he found himself received with consideration by the men whose acquaintance he most desired. Following the fashion of the day, and inspired by the books of anecdotes so successfully published by his friend Douce, D'Israeli in 1791 produced anonymously a small volume entitled 'Curiosities of Literature, the copyright of which he magnanimously presented to his publisher. The extraordinary success of this book can be accounted for only by the curious taste of the time, which still reflected the more unworthy traditions of the Addisonian era. It was an age of clubs and tea-tables, of society scandal-mongering and fireside gossip;

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and the reading public welcomed a contribution whose refined dilettantism so well matched its own. The mysteries of Eleusis and the origin of wigs received the same grave attention. This popularity induced D'Israeli to buy back the copyright at a generous valuation; he enlarged the work to five volumes, which passed through twelve in his own lifetime, and still serves to illustrate a curious literary phase.

Other compilations of similar nature met the same success: 'The Calamities of Authors,' 'Quarrels of Authors,' and 'Literary Recollections'; but the Amenities of Literature,' his last work, is the most purely literary in form, and affords perhaps the best index to D'Israeli's abilities as a writer. The reader of to-day, however, is struck by the ephemeral nature of this criticism, which yet by a curious literary experience is keeping a place among the permanent productions of its age. The reader is everywhere impressed by the human sympathy, by the wide if rather superficial knowledge, and by innumerable felicities of expression and style, which betray the cultivated mind. To lovers of the curious the books still appeal, and they will continue to hold an honorable place among the bric-a-brac of literature.

(

The spirit of curiosity which characterized the mind of D'Israeli assumed its most dignified concrete form in the Commentaries on the Reign of Charles I.' D'Israeli had an artistic sense of the values in a historical picture, with a keen perception of the importance of side lights; and although the book is not a great contribution to the literature of history, yet it became popular, and in July 1832 earned for its author the degree of D. C. L. from Oxford.

D'Israeli's romances were tedious tales, but his hold upon the public was secure, and the vast amount of miscellaneous matter which he published always found a delighted audience. The Genius of Judaism,' a philosophical inquiry into the historical significance of the permanence of the Jewish race, showed the author's psychic limitations. He designed a history of English literature, for which he had gathered much material, but increasing blindness forced him to abandon it. Much of D'Israeli's popularity was unquestionably due to his qualities of heart. His nature was fine; he was an affectionate and devoted friend, and held an enviable position in the literary circles of the day. Campbell, Byron, Rogers, and Scott alike admired and loved him, while a host of lesser men eagerly sought his friendship.

Although brought up in the Jewish faith, D'Israeli affiliated early in life with the Church of England, in which his three sons and one daughter were baptized. He died in 1848, and was buried at Brandenham. Twenty years later his daughter-in-law, the Countess of Beaconsfield, erected at Hughenden a monument to his memory.