[53] Sir Henry Rawlinson says: "At the present day, among the bons vivants of Persia, it is usual to sit down for hours before dinner, drinking wine, and eating dried fruits, such as filberts, almonds, pistachio-nuts, melon-seeds, etc. A party, indeed, often sits down at seven o'clock, and the dinner is not brought in till eleven. The dessert dishes, intermingled as they are with highly seasoned delicacies, are supposed to have the effect of stimulating the appetite."—Notes to Rawlinson's Herodotus, vol. i., p. 274.
[54] It should be borne in mind that the comparative rarity of thunderstorms in Syria and the adjacent lands makes them much more dreadful to the inhabitants of those countries. Throughout the Old Testament, and especially in the Psalms, we find many traces of the dread which such storms inspired—a dread almost unaccountable to our accustomed nerves.
[55] As the main ethical, literary, and historical interest of the whole Book is gathered up into this brief Epilogue, I offer no apology for the comparative length of my treatment of it.
[56] In the Introduction, however, I have tried to give what is known of the history of this period. Roughly speaking, I believe the Jews owed their literary advance mainly to contact with the inquisitive and learned Babylonians, and their religious advance mainly to the sorrows of the Captivity and their contact with the pure faith of the primitive Persians.
[57] Emmanuel Deutsch, whose premature death is still lamented by many as an irreparable loss. The passage will be found in his celebrated article on The Talmud in The Quarterly of October 1867. "The Quest of the Chief Good" was published at the close of that year. And at this point in it, while Deutsch was still alive, but before I knew him personally, I gently complained of the loss he had unwittingly inflicted on me. I had for ten years been collecting the gnomic sayings of the Talmud from any quarter open to one to whom the Talmud itself was a sealed book, and had indeed printed some two score of them in the Christian Spectator for 1866. And here came one who "out of his profuse wealth carelessly flung down most of my special treasures." Only half-a-dozen of the sayings I had collected now had any stamp of novelty on them to the thousands who had revelled in the wit and learning of that famous article in The Quarterly. And of these I ventured to call special attention to four which seemed to me of special value and beauty; viz., those on the four kinds of students, on new and old flasks, on not serving God for the sake of reward, and on doing God's will as if it were our will: they will all be found in this Section. But if I lost something, I also gained much by the appearance of that article, as those who read what follows will discover, although it only came into my hands as I was correcting the proofs of the final pages in my Book.
[58] This partial anticipation of the Golden Rule will be found in the Confucian Analects, book xv., chap. xxiii. "Tsze-kung asked, saying, 'Is there one word which may serve as a rule of practice for all one's life?' The Master said, 'Is not reciprocity such a word? What you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others.'" The same rule is given in another form in book v., chap. i of the Analects. The other phrases put into the sage's mouth are quoted from Dr. Legge's translation of this work.
[59] Maurice de Guérin in his Journal.
Transcriber's note:
Minor typographical errors and inconsistencies have been silently normalized. Archaic and variable spellings and hyphenation have been retained.
Page numbers are missing where the book included a blank page.