I know of no book which has come down to us with grander pretensions than this, and it is so impersonal and sincere that it is never offensive nor ridiculous.  Compare the modes in which modern literature is advertised with the prospectus of this book, and think what a reading public it addresses, what criticism it expects.  It seems to have been uttered from some eastern summit, with a sober morning prescience in the dawn of time, and you cannot read a sentence without being elevated as upon the table-land of the Ghauts.  It has such a rhythm as the winds of the desert, such a tide as the Ganges, and is as superior to criticism as the Himmaleh Mountains.  Its tone is of such unrelaxed fibre, that even at this late day, unworn by time, it wears the English and the Sanscrit dress indifferently; and its fixed sentences keep up their distant fires still, like the stars, by whose dissipated rays this lower world is illumined.  The whole book by noble gestures and inclinations renders many words unnecessary.  English sense has toiled, but Hindoo wisdom never perspired.  Though the sentences open as we read them, unexpensively, and at first almost unmeaningly, as the petals of a flower, they sometimes startle us with that rare kind of wisdom which could only have been learned from the most trivial experience; but it comes to us as refined as the porcelain earth which subsides to the bottom of the ocean.  They are clean and dry as fossil truths, which have been exposed to the elements for thousands of years, so impersonally and scientifically true that they are the ornament of the parlor and the cabinet.  Any moral philosophy is exceedingly rare.  This of Menu addresses our privacy more than most.  It is a more private and familiar, and, at the same time, a more public and universal word, than is spoken in parlor or pulpit now-a-days.  As our domestic fowls are said to have their original in the wild pheasant of India, so our domestic thoughts have their prototypes in the thoughts of her philosophers.  We are dabbling in the very elements of our present conventional and actual life; as if it were the primeval conventicle where how to eat, and to drink, and to sleep, and maintain life with adequate dignity and sincerity, were the questions to be decided.  It is later and more intimate with us even than the advice of our nearest friends.  And yet it is true for the widest horizon, and read out of doors has relation to the dim mountain line, and is native and aboriginal there.  Most books belong to the house and street only, and in the fields their leaves feel very thin.  They are bare and obvious, and have no halo nor haze about them.  Nature lies far and fair behind them all.  But this, as it proceeds from, so it addresses, what is deepest and most abiding in man.  It belongs to the noontide of the day, the midsummer of the year, and after the snows have melted, and the waters evaporated in the spring, still its truth speaks freshly to our experience.