"Be not quarrelsome in breweries, for fear that thou mayest be denounced forthwith for words which have proceeded from thy mouth, and of having spoken that of which thou art no longer conscious. Thou fallest, thy members helpless, and no one holds out a hand to thee, but thy boon-companions around thee say: 'Away with the drunkard!' Thou art wanted for some business, and thou art found rolling on the ground like an infant." In speaking of what a man owes to his mother, Ani waxes eloquent: "When she bore thee as all have to bear, she had in thee a heavy burden without being able to call on thee to share it. When thou wert born, after thy months were fulfilled, she placed herself under a yoke in earnest, her breast was in thy mouth for three years; in spite of the increasing dirtiness of thy habits, her heart felt no disgust, and she never said: 'What is that I do here?' When thou didst go to school to be instructed in writing, she followed thee every day with bread and beer from thy house. Now thou art a full-grown man, thou hast taken a wife, thou hast provided thyself with a house; bear always in mind the pains of thy birth and the care for thy education that thy mother lavished on thee, that her anger may not rise up against thee, and that she lift not her hands to God, for he will hear her complaint!" The whole of the book does not rise to this level, but we find in it several maxims which appear to be popular proverbs, as for instance: "He who hates idleness will come without being called;" "A good walker comes to his journey's end without needing to hasten;" or, "The ox which goes at the head of the flock and leads the others to pasture is but an animal like his fellows." Towards the end, the son Khonshotpu, weary of such a lengthy exhortation to wisdom, interrupts his father roughly: "Do not everlastingly speak of thy merits, I have heard enough of thy deeds;" whereupon Ani resignedly restrains himself from further speech, and a final parable gives us the motive of his resignation: "This is the likeness of the man who knows the strength of his arm. The nursling who is in the arms of his mother cares only for being suckled; but no sooner has he found his mouth than he cries: 'Give me bread!'" It is, perhaps, difficult for us to imagine an Egyptian in love repeating madrigals to his mistress,* for we cannot easily realise that the hard and blackened bodies we see in our museums have once been men and women loving and beloved in their own day. * The remains of Egyptian amatory literature have been collected, translated, and commentated on by Maspero. They have been preserved in two papyri, one of which is at Turin, the other in the British Museum. The first of these appears to be a sort of dialogue in which the trees of a garden boast one after another of the beauty of a woman, and discourse of the love-scenes which took place under their shadow.