Page:Aphorisms — an address delivered before the Edinburgh Philosophical Institution, November 11, 1887.djvu/29

 is sometimes better than the dinner." I had made some other extracts from this unhappy sage, but you will thank me for having thrown them into the fire. Finally, a great authoress of our time was urged by a friend to fill up a gap in our literature by composing a volume of "Thoughts": the result was that most insufferable of all deadly-lively prosings in our sublunary world, Theophrastus Such. One living writer of genius has given us a little sheaf of subtly-pointed maxims in the Ordeal of Richard Feverel, and perhaps he will one day divulge to the world the whole contents of Sir Austin Feverel's unpublished volume, The Pilgrim's Scrip.

Yet the wisdom of life has its full part in our literature. Keen insight into peculiarities of individual motive, and concentrated interest in the play of character, shine not merely in Shakespeare, whose mighty soul, as Hallam says, was saturated with moral observation, nor in the brilliant verse of Pope. For those who love meditative reading on the ways and destinies of men, we have Burton and Fuller