[46] This reminds me of what Pope, no less piously than pathetically says, respecting his mother, in the following most beautiful lines: “Me let the tender office long engage, To rock the cradle of reposing age, With lenient arts extend a mothers breath, Make languor smile, and smooth the bed of death; _Explore the thought, explain the asking eye_, And keep awhile one parent from the sky.” _See his Seventh Epistle, near the end._ [47] The following extract from Sir William Jones, as given by Moor in his Hindu Pantheon, p. 421, demonstrates the great antiquity of this precept: “Our divine religion has no need of such aids as many are willing to give it; by asserting that the wisest men of this world were ignorant of the two great maxims—that _we must act in respect of others as we should wish them to act in respect of ourselves_—and that, _instead of returning evil for evil, we should confer benefits on those who injure us_. But the first rule is implied in a speech of Lysias, and expressed in distinct phrases by Thales and Pittacus; and I have even seen it word for word, in the original of Confucius, which I carefully compared with the Latin translation. If the conversion, therefore, of the _Pandits_ and _Maulavis_, in India, shall ever be attempted by protestant missionaries, they must beware of asserting, while they teach the gospel, what those _Pandits_ and _Maulavis_ would know to be false. The former would cite the beautiful _Arya_ couplet, which was written at least three centuries before our era, and which pronounce the duty of a good man, even in the moment of destruction, to consist, _not only in forgiving, but even in a desire of benefiting his destroyer_—as _the sandal tree, in the instant of its overthrow, sheds perfume on the axe which fells it_. And the latter would triumph, in repeating the verse of SADI, who represents _a return of good for good as a slight reciprocity_; but says to the virtuous man, ‘_Confer benefits on him who has injured thee_:’ using an _Arabic_ sentence, and a maxim apparently of the ancient Arabs. Nor would the _Mussulmans_ fail to recite four distichs of _Hafiz_, who has illustrated that maxim with fanciful but elegant allusions:— “Learn from yon orient shell to love thy foe, And store with pearls the hand that brings thee woe: Free, like yon rock, from base vindictive pride, Emblaze with gems the wrist that rends thy side. Mark where yon tree rewards the stony shower With fruit nectarious, or the balmy flower: All nature calls aloud—‘Shall man do less Than heal the smiter, and the railer bless?’” _As. Res. Vol. IV._