Here, however, the Indian philosopher describes human life as consisting
of only four scenes; but, like our own Shakspeare, he compares the world
to a stage and man to a player. An epigram preserved in the _Anthologia_
also likens the world to a theatre and human life to a drama:
This life a theatre we well may call,
Where every actor must perform with art;
Or laugh it through, and make a farce of all,
Or learn to bear with grace a tragic part.
It is surely both instructive and interesting thus to discover
resemblances in thought and expression in the writings of men of
comprehensive intellect, who lived in countries and in times far apart.
VI
WISE SAYINGS OF THE RABBIS.
"Concise sentences," says Bacon, "like darts, fly abroad and make
impressions, while long discourses are flat things, and not regarded."
And Seneca has remarked that "even rude and uncultivated minds are
struck, as it were, with those short but weighty sentences which
anticipate all reasoning by flashing truths upon them at once." Wise men
in all ages seem to have been fully aware of the advantage of condensing
into pithy sentences the results of their observations of the course of
human life; and the following selection of sayings of the Jewish
Fathers, taken from the _Pirke Aboth_ (the 41st treatise of the Talmud,
compiled by Nathan of Babylon, A.
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