Rare are they who prefer virtue to the pleasures of sense. In hearing litigations, I am like any one else. I differ, in wishing to prevent these litigations.

What the superior man seeks is in himself; what the small man seeks is in others.

A man can enlarge his principles; principles do not enlarge the man.

The superior man is dignified, and does not wrangle; social, and not a partisan. He does not promote a man simply because of his words, nor does he put good words aside because of the man. The foundation of all good is the virtue of individual men. With this everything begins, and for this every good institution works.

THE GOLDEN RULE.

Tze-Kung once asked if there was any one word which would serve as a rule for all one's life, and the Master replied, "Yes," naming a written character which has been translated, Reciprocity. He then explained it, saying, "What you would not others should do unto you, do not unto them."

[Although objection has been made to the worth of this rule, as being expressed only in a negative form, while the Golden Rule given by Christ is positive, yet the best Chinese scholars agree that Confucius, who repeated it several tim, meant it in its positive and most comprehensive sense.]

SEEKING THE FORD.

Once when Confucius, in traveling, was looking about for a ford of a river, he sent Tze-lu to ask a man who was at work in a neighboring field, where it was. He proved to be a recluse or hermit, and having learned that his questioner was a disciple of Confucius, said to him: "Disorder in a swelling flood spreads over the kingdom, and no one is able to repress it. Rather than follow a master who withdraws from one ruler and another that will not take his advice, should you not join those who withdraw from the world altogether?" He then resumed his hoe and would give no information. Tze-lu returned and reported his words to the Master, who said: "It is impossible to withdraw from the world, and associate with birds and beasts that have no affinity with us. With whom should I associate but with suffering men? The disorder that prevails is what requires my efforts. If right principles ruled through the kingdom, there would be no need for me to change its state."

HE early history of Greece is mythical; an assemblage of legends and traditions, magnified, expanded and spiritualized by patriotic and pious imagination. According to the old historian Eusebius, the city of Sicyon, in northern Peloponnesus, was founded more than two thousand years before Christ. Uranus (the Greek version of Varuna, the supreme Hindu deity) is said to have entered Greece at about the same period. Greece, in the year 1900 B.C., is thought to have been occupied by a dark-skinned race known as the Pelasgi, whom we know only as a race of toilers. The Greek language is descended from the primitive Aryan, and is a sister of the Sanskrit. It was introduced by the Achaians, a fair-skinned race, who entered Greece from the north, and appear to have dominated the original inhabitants without difficulty. About 1550, according to a late legend, Cecrops arrived from Egypt, and became first king of Athens, introducing civilization among the heretofore rude people of the peninsula. Earlier stories make him a Pelasgic hero. Again, it is related that Cadmus, coming from Phoenicia about 1493 B.C., founded Thebes and taught his alphabet. Two hundred years later, Pelops, from Phrygia, settled in Peloponnesus, over which his grandson Agamemnon exercised sovereign sway. Some time after the siege of Troy, rude Dorian invaders, sweeping southward from Thessaly, drove

many of the Achaians across the Egean Sea to Ionia, and suppressed the early culture of Greece proper for centuries. These Dorians founded the kingdom of Sparta. The name Hellenes, by which the Greeks called themselves in the time of their glory, was not adopted till long afterwards.

In all these statements we may trace, if we will, a complex of emigrations and adjustments which resulted in the Hellas, or Greece, of historic times. Many elements seem to have combined to make the Greeks, and the mixture was the most fortunate one known in history. For this people was destined to enjoy a career of unexampled glory in both war and intellectual achievement; and the literature which they have left behind them is not only the most nearly perfect known, but it has served as the form upon which all subsequent literatures have been modeled, and which they have vainly sought to rival.

What may have been the early and crude beginnings of this literature we know not. The very first examples of it which have come down to us-the Poems of Homer-show the highest levels of conception and execution. During the simplicity and repose of the prehistoric pastoral age, the Greeks probably regarded their gods as embodiments of the forces of nature, and made songs and chants to celebrate and propitiate them. But these were never reduced to writing; even the epics of Homer were transmitted orally, though the statement that Pisistratus, tyrant of Athens 560 B.C., commissioned Onomacritus to collect them for a public library does not imply that they had never been written previously. Whatever their origin, no nobler compositions than the Iliad and Odyssey were produced in Greece, or have been seen since their time; and in order to account for their appearance, we have to suppose a long lapse of precedent time, together with extraordinary natural aptitudes.

The date of the Homeric period is variously placed by different students anywhere between the years 1200 and 700 B.C. Herodotus, the first Greek historian, put it four hundred years before his own time, or B.C. 850. It seems safe to place it about the middle of the tenth century. It was followed by a series of inferior imitations, and then occasional

outbursts of reflective and lyric poetry. These were confined to the Greek settlers in Asia Minor, and it was not until the Hellenic spirit was stirred to its depths by the Persian invasion of 480 B.C., that art and literature received the extraordinary stimulus which culminated in the Age of Pericles (495-429 B.C.). The perfection to which the Attic tongue and sculpture and painting were then brought maintained itself for a while, but gradually declined with the loss of political freedom. The degenerate Greeks became traders in the treasures which had been their glory, and thus dispersed through the world the trophies of their ancestors' genius.

The Literature of Greece is divided into three periods: 1. From Homer to the Persian Invasion, 490 B.C. This literature is entirely poetic-epic, didactic, elegiac and lyric. 2. The Attic Period, reaching to the death of Alexander the Great, 323 B.C. In it prose began to be employed by the historians Herodotus and Thucydides, and was polished to the highest perfection by the orators, such as Lysias and Demosthenes; by philosophers, such as Plato and Aristotle; and by writers of miscellany, such as Xenophon. 3. The Decadent Literature, having its centre first at the court of the Ptolemies in Alexandria, and afterwards at Rome. was extinguished amidst the waste places of Byzantine historians and grammarians. The idyls of Theocritus, the biographies of Plutarch, and the satires of Lucian, form the worthiest product of this era, which may be said to terminate with the triumph of Christianity, 312 A.D., or may be prolonged to the fall of the Byzantine Empire, 1453 A.D.

It

HAIR-SPLITTING and dry-as-dust critics have long sought to disprove the existence of the greatest of poets, and to show that his epics are a semi-accidental collocation of a number of early versified legends. But those whose opinion is entitled to most weight, and who know Homer best, are agreed that he is no myth, but lived an actual man, and composed the works-or the better part of them-which are credited to his name.

What manner of man he was, however, we have no means of determining, aside from the mental grandeur demonstrated in his works. In ancient times Smyrna, Rhodes, Colophon, Salamis in Cyprus, Chios, Argos, and even Athens, contended for the honor of being his birthplace. The obvious fact that the author of the epics must have been a man used to associate with princes, and must have traveled widely and with keenly observant eyes, disposes of the assertion that he was either blind or a beggar. Doubtless he was poet-laureate of some great Achaian monarch.

Between the age which Homer sang, and the historic period, there is an interval as great as that which divides the Saxon Heptarchy from the England of Cromwell. But his story of the exploits of the Achaians was accepted by all Greece as the glorification of the national Heroic Age. In the two great poems, one of War, the other of Wandering, were embodied ideals and types belonging to the entire race. The Iliad exhibits a community of independent chiefs, each ruling his city or island, a trained warrior, always prepared