When he was asked what sort of wine he enjoyed drinking, he answered, "Another man's." [Of a different temper was Dante, who knew too well "how salt the bread of others tastes!"] Some one advised him to hunt up his runaway slave. But he replied, "It is ridiculous if Manes lives without Diogenes, but Diogenes cannot without Manes." When asked why men give to beggars, but not to philosophers, he said, "Because they expect themselves to become lame and blind; but philosophers, never!" CLEANTHES When a comic actor apologized for having ridiculed him from the stage, he answered gently, "It would be preposterous, when Bacchus and Hercules bear the raillery of the poets without showing any anger, if I should be indignant when I chance to be attacked." PYTHAGORAS _Precepts_ Do not stir the fire with a sword. Do not devour your heart. Always have your bed packed up. Do not walk in the main street. Do not cherish birds with crooked talons. Avoid a sharp sword. When you travel abroad, look not back at your own borders. [Diogenes explains this: be resigned to death.] Consider nothing exclusively your own. Destroy no cultivated tree, or harmless animal. Modesty and decorum consist in never yielding to laughter, and yet not looking stern. [_Cf._ Emerson on Manners.] Translated for 'A Library of the World's Best Literature,' by William C. Lawton. ISAAC D'ISRAELI (1766-1848) [Illustration: ISAAC D'ISRAELI] Among the writers whose education and whose tastes were the outcome of the classicism of the eighteenth century, yet whose literary life lapped over into the Victorian epoch, was Isaac D'Israeli, born at Enfield in May 1766. D'Israeli was of Jewish origin, his ancestors having fled from the Spanish persecutions of the fifteenth century to find a home in Venice, whence a younger branch migrated to England. At the time of his birth his family had stood for generations among the foremost English Jews, his father having been made a citizen by special legislation. The boy, however, did not inherit the commercial spirit which had established his house. He was a lover of books and a dreamer of dreams, and so early developed literary tendencies that his frightened father sent him off to Amsterdam to school, in the hope of curing proclivities so dangerous. Here he became familiar with the works of the Encyclopædists, and adopted the theories of Rousseau. On returning to England in his nineteenth year, he replied to his father's proposition that he should enter a commercial house at Bordeaux, by a long poem in which he passionately inveighed against the commercial spirit, and avowed himself a student of philosophy and letters. His father's reluctant acquiescence was obtained at last through the good offices of the laureate Pye, to whom the youth had already dedicated his first book, 'A Defence of Poetry.'