Page [72]. “Your Majesty can easily put to death a living man, but you cannot restore a dead man to life.”—Here again (see note on page [184]) we have what seems to be an instance of borrowing from Sa`dī, who, in his Gulistān, viii, maxim 54, thus finely expresses this sentiment (Professor Eastwick’s translation):
’Tis very easy one alive to slay;
Not so to give back life thou tak’st away:
Reason demands that archers patience show,
For shafts once shot return not to the bow.[[67]]
Were it possible, we might suppose that our English poet Cowley had simply paraphrased these couplets of Sa`dī in the following verses:
Easy it was the living to have slain,
But bring them, if thou canst, to life again:
The arrow’s shot—mark how it cuts the air,
Try now to bring it back, or stay it there: