Seneca says, "Wouldst
thou subject all things to thyself? Subject thyself to reason." A
modern writer says, "They are not kings who have thrones, but they who
know how to govern." Now any one meeting these maxims, if they have
any effect on him, will be set a-thinking to discover the principle
contained in them. He will feel that there is a profound significance
in them; and his curiosity will be awakened, his intellect fired, to
find out the grounds and bearings of the law they denote. In this way
the words of the wise are goads to prick and urge the faculties of
inferior minds. Pointed expressions of the experience of the sovereign
masters of life and the world impel feebler and less agile natures to
follow the tracks of light and emulate the choice examples set before
them, with swifter movements and with richer results than they could
ever have attained, if not thus encouraged. Proverbial axioms flourish
copiously in the idiomatic ground and vernacular climate of unlearned,
undisciplined, unreflective minds, as thistles on the highway where
every ass may gather them. But precious maxims, those "short sentences
drawn from a long experience," as Cervantes calls them, are found
mostly in the writings of the greatest geniuses, Solomon, Aristotle,
Shakspeare, Bacon, Goethe, Richter, Emerson: and they appeal
comparatively but to a select class of minds, kindred in some degree
to those that originated them.
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