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 infected by an English habit of sermonising.  “Never resist temptation:  prove all things:  hold fast that which is good,” is a sermon.  But he has the inborn love of maxims, all the same, and, though they are too often as long as a book, or even as a preface, his maxims sometimes have the genuine medicinal taste.  These from The Revolutionist’s Handbook, for instance, are true maxims: 

  “Vulgarity in a king flatters the majority of the nation.”

  “He who can, does.  He who cannot, teaches.”

  “Marriage is popular because it combines the maximum of
  temptation with the maximum of opportunity.”

  “When a man wants to murder a tiger, he calls it sport;
  when the tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity.  The
  distinction between Crime and Justice is no greater.”

  “Home is the girl’s prison, and the woman’s workhouse.”

  “Decency is Indecency’s Conspiracy of Silence.”

But among the masters of the maxim, I suppose no one has come so near as Chamfort to the Master himself.  There is a difference.  If Chamfort brings rather less strength and bitterness to his dose, he presents it with a certain grace, a sense of mortal things, and a kind of pity mingled with his contempt that Rochefoucauld would have despised: 

  “Il est malheureux pour les hommes que les pauvres n’aient
  pas l’instinct ou la fierte de l’elephant, qui ne se reproduit pas
  dans la servitude.”

  “Otez l’amour-propre de l’amour, il en reste tres peu de
  chose.”