APPENDIX A LVII 



dawn of history, and we still sympathize with the idylls of Solomon 

 and the Shulamite girl of the Bible, and smile at the gossip of the 

 Syracusan women in Theocritus. Happiness is success, and happiness 

 is dependent upon conduct. Now, conduct is the subject matter of 

 literature, whether we read it in Homer, or Plutarch, or Thucydides, or 

 Shakespeare, or Kipling, or even in our own Drummond's sympathetic 

 portraiture of our quaint and very dear friend — the Habitant of Quebec. 

 Literature, then, being the study of human life, it is, of necessity, 

 the most practical of all studies — practical because it deals with the 

 varied experiences and capacities of the human soul. For that reason 

 great statesmen have been trained in letters rather than in science — in 

 classics rather than in mathematics. Their field is human life and in 

 the mirror of what are happily called " the humanities " that life is 

 reflected. The statesman seeks to move men, and he must study man- 

 kind — study them in the past in history — in the present in current 

 literature, and from thence make his deductions for the future. With 

 truth did Pope write: 



The proper study of mankind is man. 



That is the highest Ikind of knowledge; for all social institutions 

 are stable in proportion as they are based upon it, and it is the most 

 important to human happiness. " Know thyself " had the place of 

 honour among the maxims of the seven sages inscribed upon the temple 

 of Delphi, five hundred years before Christ. These sages were not 

 theorists. They were statesmen, law-givers, men of affairs, and, like 

 the writers of Ecclesiastes and Proverbs, were ignorant of all we know 

 as exact science. Manners and circumstances change, but the master 

 springs of conduct are unchanged, and, in the great works of ïormer 

 ages, we may see ourselves acting in a different stage setting and before 

 a different audience. 



" Visible and tangible products of the past," says Carlyle, " I 

 reckon up to the extent of three. Cities with their cabinets and arsenals ; 

 then tilled fields with their roads and bridges; and thirdly — books. 

 In which third truly lies a worth far surpassing that of the two others." 

 Not only are they surpassing in worth, but in endurance. The great 

 cities of the ancient world, once the centres of great empires — Babylon, 

 Tyre, Carthage, Thebies — are mounds of ruins. The rich plains of 

 Asia and the productive fields of Northern Africa, once the granary of 

 iho "Roman world, have, for long centuries, remained untilled; but the 

 literatures of Greece, Eome, and Judea, still sway the minds of men. 

 The wealth and luxury of the merchant princes of old equalled anything 



