only tolerated as so much jam to give a relish to the "morality." It was therefore appropriate that these Asiatic tales with their Buddhistic tendencies should be introduced just at the period when Europe was Asiaticising. For if we may generalise about such big things as continents, may we not say that the ideal of Asia has been to be, that of Europe to do?[1] And was it not the striving of mediæval Europe to be, and not primarily to do, that makes it seem so alien to us moderns who have recovered the old European tradition of Greeks and Romans and Teutons? With touching simplicity, the mediævals, like the Asiatics, thought it only necessary to know, in order to do, the right, and hence their appeal to Oriental wisdom: alas, we moderns know better! It is important to notice this aspect of the book, as it makes it still more remarkable that it should have been accepted as a sort of secular Bible, if we may so term it, by men of so many different religions. There must have been something essentially human in this Buddhistic book that it should have been welcomed as a moral encheiridion by Zoroastrians, Moslems,
- ↑ Lindley Murray would perhaps have added that the ideal of Africa has been to suffer.
