egie's occupation will be gone.

For these reasons, one heartily welcomes Messrs. Methuen's re-issue of
an old and excellent translation of Rochefoucauld's _Maxims_, edited by
Mr. George Powell. The book is a little large for tabloids. It runs to
nearly two hundred pages, and it might have been more conveniently
divided by ten or even by a hundred. But still, as Rochefoucauld is the
very medicine-man of maxims, we will leave it at that. He united every
quality of the moral and intellectual pill-doctor. He lived in an
artificial and highly intellectualised society. He was a contemporary
and friend of great wits. He haunted salons, and was graciously received
by perceptive ladies, who never made a boredom of virtue. He mingled in
a chaos of political intrigue, and was involved in burlesque rebellion.
He was intimate with something below the face-value of public men, and
he used the language that Providence made for maxims. But, above all, he
had the acid or tang of poison needed to make the true, the medicinal
maxim. His present editor compares him with Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius,
and Bacon--great names, but gnomic philosophers rather than authors of
maxims proper. Nor were the splendid figures of the eighteenth century,
who wrote so eloquently about love, virtue, and humanity, real
inventors of maxims. Their sugar-coating was spread too thick. Often
their teaching was sugar to the core--a sweetmeat, not a pill; or, like
the fraudulent patents in the trade, it revealed soft soap within the
covering, and nothing more. George Meredith had a natural love of
maxims, and an instinct for them. One remembers the "Pilgrim's Scrip" in
_Richard Feverel_, and the Old Buccaneer in _The Amazing Marriage_. But
usually his maxims want the bitter tang:

"Who rises from Prayer a better man, his Prayer is answered."

"For this reason so many fall from God, who have attained
to Him; that they cling to Him with their weakness, not with
their strength."

"No regrets; they unman the heart we want for to-morrow."

"My foe can spoil my face; he beats me if he spoils my
temper."

One sees at once that these are not medicinal maxims, but excellent
advice--concentrated sermons, after our English manner. "Friends may
laugh: I am not roused. My enemy's laugh is a bugle blown in the
night"--that has a keener flavour. So has "Never forgive an injury
without a return blow for it." Among the living, Mr. Bernard Shaw is
sometimes infe