They like fun and jokes and amusement as
much as we. They abhor the same class of defects which disgust
us,--hypocrisies, shams, lies. The inner circle of their friendship is
the same as ours to-day, based on sincerity and admiration. There is the
same infinite variety in character, and yet the same uniformity. The
human heart beats to the same sentiments that it does under all
civilizations and conditions of life. No people can live without
friendship and sympathy and love; and these are ultimate sentiments of
the soul, which are as eternal as the ideas of Plato. Why do the Psalms
of David, written for an Oriental people four thousand years ago,
excite the same emotions in the minds of the people of England or France
or America that they did among the Jews? It is because they appeal to
our common humanity, which never changes,--the same to-day as it was in
the beginning, and will be to the end. It is only form and fashion which
change; men remain the same. The men and women of the Bible talked
nearly the same as we do, and seem to have had as great light on the
primal principles of wisdom and truth and virtue. Who can improve on the
sagacity and worldly wisdom of the Proverbs of Solomon? They have a
perennial freshness, and appeal to universal experience. It is this
fidelity to nature which is one of the great charms of Shakspeare. We
quote his brief sayings as expressive of what we feel and know of the
certitudes of our moral and intellectual life. They will last forever,
under every variety of government, of social institutions, of races, and
of languages. And they will last because these every-day sentiments are
put in such pithy, compressed, unique, and novel form, like the Proverbs
of Solomon or the sayings of Epictetus. All nations and ages alike
recognize the moral wisdom in the sayings of those immortal sages whose
writings have delighted and enlightened the world, because they appeal
to consciousness or experience.

Now it must be confessed that the poetry of Chaucer does not abound in
the moral wisdom and spiritual insight and profound reflections on the
great mysteries of human life which stand out so conspicuously in the
writings of Dante, Shakspeare, Milton, Goethe, and other first-class
poets. He does not describe the inner life, but the outward habits and
condition of the people of his times. He is not serious enough, nor
learned enough, to enter upon the discussion of those high themes which
agitated th