worth."

"What is easy ought to be entered upon as though
it were difficult, and what is difficult as though it were
easy."

"Those things are generally best remembered which
ought most to be forgot. Not seldom the surest remedy
of the evil consists in forgetting it."

It is France that excels in the form no less than in the matter of
aphorism, and for the good reason that in France the arts of polished
society were relatively at an early date the objects of a serious and
deliberate cultivation, such as was and perhaps remains unknown in the
rest of Europe. Conversation became a fine art. "I hate war," said
one; "it spoils conversation." The leisured classes found their
keenest relish in delicate irony, in piquancy, in contained vivacity,
in the study of niceties of observation and finish of phrase. You have
a picture of it in such a play as Molière's _Misanthropist_, where we
see a section of the polished life of the time--men and women making
and receiving compliments, discoursing on affairs with easy lightness,
flitting backwards and forwards with a thousand petty hurries, and
among them one singular figure, hoarse, rough, sombre, moving with a
chilling reality in the midst of frolicking shadows. But the shadows
were all in all to one another. Not a point of conduct, not a subtlety
of social motive, escaped detection and remark.

Dugald Stewart has pointed to the richness of the French tongue
in appropriate and discriminating expressions for varieties of
intellectual turn and shade. How many of us, who claim to a reasonable