ON THE 
 
 LESSONS IN PROVERBS. 
 
ON THE 
 
 LESSONS IS PROVERBS 
 
 BEING THE SUBSTANCE OF 
 
 LECTURES DELIVERED TO YOUNG MEN S SOCIETIES 
 
 ELS 
 
 AT PORTSMOUTH AND ELSEWHERE 
 
 
 
 RICHARD CHENEVIX DRENCH, B. D. 
 
 AUTHOR OF THE STUDY OF WORDS," "SYNONYMS OF THE NEW TESTAMENT," ETC. 
 
 VICAR OF ITCHENSTOKE. HANTS ; EXAMINING CHAPLAIN TO THE LORD BISHOP 
 
 OF OXFORD; AND PROFESSOR OF DIVINITY, KING S COLLEGE, LONDON. 
 
 FROM THE SECOND LONDON EDITION REVISED AND ENLARGED 
 
 RED FIELD 
 
 110 AND 112 NASSAU STREET, NEW YORK. 
 
 Fourth Edition.] 1855. 
 
\y / 
 
 T7 
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 IT may be as well to state that the lectures which 
 are here published were never delivered as a com 
 plete course, but only one here and two there, as 
 matter gradually grew under my hands ; yet so that 
 very much the greater part of what is contained in 
 this volume has been -at one time or another actually 
 delivered. Although I have always taken a lively 
 interest in national proverbs, I had no intention at 
 the first of making a book about them ; but only se 
 lected the subject as one which I thought though 
 I was not confident of this might afford me suffi 
 cient material for a single lecture, which I had un 
 dertaken some time ago to deliver. I confess that 
 I was at that time almost entirely ignorant of the 
 immense number and variety of books bearing on the 
 subject. Many of these I still know only by name. 
 With some of the best, however, I have made myself 
 
 2 
 
6 PREFACE. 
 
 acquainted ; and by their aid, with the addition of 
 such further material as I could myself furnish, these 
 lectures have assumed their present shape : and I 
 publish them because none of the works on proverbs 
 which I know arc exactly that book for all readers 
 which 1 could have wished to see. Either they in 
 clude matter which can not be fitly placed before all 
 or they address themselves to the scholar alone, 
 or if not so, arc at any rate inaccessible to the mere 
 English reader or they contain bare lists of prov 
 erbs, with no endeavor to compare, illustrate, and 
 explain them or if they do seek to explain, yet 
 they do it without attempting to sound the depths or 
 measure the real significance of that which they un 
 dertake to unfold. From these or other causes it has 
 come to pass that with a multitude of books, many of 
 them admirable, on a subject so popular, there is no 
 single one which is frequent in the hands of men. 
 I will not deny that, with all the slightness and short 
 comings of my own, I have still hoped to supply, at 
 least for the present, this deficiency. 
 
 ITCHENSTOKE, HANTS (ENGLAND). 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 LECTURE I. 
 THE FORM AND DEFINITION OF A PROVERB PAGE 9 
 
 LECTURE II. 
 THE GENERATION OF PROVERBS 34 
 
 LECTURE III. 
 THE PROVERBS OF DIFFERENT NATIONS COMPARED 58 
 
 LECTURE IV. 
 THE POETRY, WIT, AND WISDOM OF PROVERBS 77 
 
 LECTURE V. 
 THE MORALITY OF PROVERBS 103 
 
 LECTURE VI. 
 THE THEOLOGY OF PROVERBS 128 
 
 APPENDIX.. . . .155 
 
THE LESSONS IN PROVERBS- 
 
 LECTURE I. 
 
 THE FOEM AND DEFINITION OF A TKOVERB. 
 
 IT may very easily have happened that from 
 some of us proverbs have never attracted the no 
 tice which I am persuaded they deserve ; and from 
 this, it may follow that, when invited to bestow 
 even a brief attention on them, we are in some 
 doubt whether they will repay our pains. WG 
 think of them but as sayings on the lips of the 
 multitude; not a few of them have been familiar 
 to us as far back as we can remember; often em 
 ployed by ourselves, or in our hearing, on slight 
 and trivial occasions : and thus, from these and 
 other causes, it may very well be, that, however 
 sometimes one may have taken our fancy, we yet 
 have remained blind in the main to the wit, wisdom, 
 and imagination, of which they are full ; and very 
 1* 
 
10 FORM AND DEFINITION OF A PROVERB. 
 
 little conscious of the amusement, instruction, in 
 sight, which they are capable of yielding. Unless 
 too we have devoted a certain attention to the sub 
 ject, we may not be at all aware how little those 
 more familiar ones, which are frequent on the lips 
 of men, exhaust the treasure of our native proverbs ; 
 how many and what excellent ones remain behind, 
 having now for the most part fallen out of sight ; 
 or what riches in like kind other nations possess. 
 We may little guess how many aspects of interest 
 there are in which our own by themselves, and 
 again our own compared with those of other peo 
 ple, may be regarded. 
 
 And yet there is much to induce us to reconsider 
 our judgment, should we be thus tempted to slight 
 them, and to count them not merely trite, but triv 
 ial and unworthy of a serious attention. The fact 
 that they please the people, and have pleased them 
 for ages that they possess so vigorous a principle 
 of life, as to have maintained their ground, ever 
 new and ever young, through all the centuries of a 
 nation s existence nay, that many of them have 
 pleased not one nation only, but many, so that they 
 have made themselves a home in the most differ 
 ent lands and further, that they have, not a few 
 of them, come down to us from remotest antiquity, 
 borne safely upon the waters of that great stream 
 of time, which has swallowed so much beneath its 
 waves all this, I think, may well make us pause, 
 
POPULAR USE OF PROVERBS. 11 
 
 should we be tempted to turn away from them with 
 anything of indifference or disdain. 
 And then further, there is this to be considered, 
 that some of the greatest poets, the profoundest 
 philosophers, the most learned scholars, the most 
 genial writers in every kind, have delighted in 
 them, have made large and frequent use of them, 
 have bestowed infinite labor on the gathering and 
 elucidating of them. In a fastidious age, indeed, 
 and one of false refinement, they may go nearly or 
 quite out of use among the so-called upper classes. 
 " ~No gentleman," says Lord Chesterfield, or " no 
 man of fashion," as I think is his exact phrase, 
 "ever uses a proverb."* And with how fine a 
 touch of nature Shakespeare makes Coriolanus, the 
 man who, with all his greatness, is entirely devoid 
 of all sympathy for the people, to utter his scorn 
 of them in scorn of their proverbs, and of their fre 
 quent employment of these : 
 
 " Hang em ! 
 
 They said they were an hungry, sighed forth proverbs ; 
 That, hunger broke atone ivalls ; that, dogs must eat; 
 That, meat was made for mouths ; that, the gods sent not 
 Corn for the rich men only ; with these shreds 
 They vented their complainings." 
 
 Coriolanus, Act I. Sc. 1. 
 
 But that they have been always dear to the true 
 intellectual aristocracy of a nation, there is abun- 
 
 * A similar contempt of them speaks out in the antithesis of the 
 French Jesuit, Bonhours: "Les proverbes sont les sentences du peu- 
 ple, et les sentences sont les proverbs des honnetes gens." 
 
12 FORM AND DEFINITION OF A PROVERB. 
 
 dant evidence to prove. Take but these three names 
 in evidence, which though few, are in themselves 
 ji host. Aristotle made a collection of proverbs ; 
 nor did he count that he was herein doing aught 
 unworthy of his great reputation, however some of 
 his adversaries may afterward have made of the 
 fact that he did so a charge against him. He is 
 said to have been the first collector of them, though 
 many afterward followed in the same path. Shake 
 speare loves them so well, that besides often citing 
 them, and scattering innumerable covert allusions, 
 rapid side glances at them which we are in danger 
 of missing unless at home in the proverbs of Eng 
 land, several of his plays, as Measure for Measure, 
 AlUs well that ends well, have popular proverbs 
 for their titles. And Cervantes, a name only in 
 ferior to Shakespeare, has made very plain the 
 affection with which he regarded them. Every 
 reader of Don Quixote, will remember his squire, 
 who sometimes can not open his mouth but there 
 drop from it almost as many proverbs as words. I 
 might name others who have held the proverb in 
 honor men who though they may not attain to 
 these first three, are yet deservedly accounted great ; 
 as Plautus, the most genial of Latin poets, Eabelais 
 and Montaigne the two most original of French 
 authors; and how often Fuller, whom Coleridge 
 lias styled the wittiest of writers, justifies this praise 
 in his witty employment of some old proverb; and 
 
PROVERBS IN SCRIPTURE. 13 
 
 no reader can thoroughly understand and enjoy 
 Hudibras, none but will miss a multitude of its 
 keenest allusions, who is not thoroughly familiar 
 with the proverbial literature of England. 
 
 Nor is this all ; we may with reverence adduce 
 quite another name than any of these, the Lord 
 himself, as condescending to employ such proverbs 
 as he found current among his people. Tims, on 
 the occasion of his first open appearance in the 
 synagogue of Nazareth, he refers to the proverb, 
 Physician heal thyself (Luke iv. 23), as one which 
 his hearers will perhaps bring forward against him 
 self; and again personally to another, A prophet 
 is not without honor hut in his own country, as at 
 tested in his own history; and at the well of Sychar 
 he declares, " Herein is that saying," or that prov 
 erb, " true, One soweth, and another rea/peth" (John 
 iv. 37). But he is much more than a quoter of 
 other men s proverbs ; he is a maker of his own. As 
 all forms of human composition find their arche 
 types and their highest realization in Scripture, as 
 there is no tragedy like Job, no pastoral like Ruth, 
 no lyric melodies like the Psalms, so we should 
 affirm no proverbs like those of Solomon, were it 
 not that " a greater than Solomon" has drawn out 
 of the rich treasure house of the Eternal "Wisdom a 
 series of proverbs more costly still. For indeed 
 how much of our Lord s teaching, especially as re 
 corded in the first three Evangelists, is thrown into 
 
14 FORM AND DEFINITION OF A PROVERB. 
 
 this form ; and how many of his words have in this 
 shape passed over as " faithful sayings" upon the 
 lips of men ; and so doing have fulfilled a neces 
 sary condition of the proverb, whereof we shall 
 have presently to speak. 
 
 But not urging this testimony any further a 
 testimony too august to be lightly used, or employ 
 ed merely to swell the testimonies of men least 
 of all, men of such " uncircumcised lips" as, with 
 all their genius, were more than one of these whom 
 I have named and appealing only to the latter, I 
 shall be justified, I feel, in affirming that whether 
 we listen to those single voices which make a 
 silence for themselves, and are heard through the 
 centuries and their ages, or to that great universal 
 voice of humanity, which is wiser even than these, 
 for it is these, with all else which is worthy to be 
 heard added to them, there is here a subject, which 
 those whose judgments should go very far with us 
 have not accounted unworthy of their serious regard. 
 
 And I am sure if we bestow on them ourselves 
 even a moderate share of attention, we shall be 
 ready to set our own seal to the judgment of wiser 
 men that have preceded us here. For, indeed, what 
 a body of popular good sense and good feeling, as 
 we sliall then perceive, is contained in the better, 
 which is also the more numerous portion of them; 
 what a sense of natural equity, what a spirit of kind 
 ness breathes out from many of them ; what prudent 
 
PRACTICAL USE OF PRO VERBS. 15 
 
 rules for the management of life, what shrewd wis 
 dom, which though not of this world, is most truly 
 for it, what frugality, what patience, what perse 
 verance, what manly independence, are continually 
 inculcated by them. "What a fine knowledge of the 
 human heart do many of them display ; what use 
 ful, and not always obvious, hints do they offer on 
 most important points, as on the choice of com 
 panions, the bringing up of children, the bearing 
 of prosperity and adversity, the restraint of all 
 immoderate expectations. And they take a yet 
 higher range than this; they have their ethics, 
 their theology, their views of man in his highest 
 relations of all, as a man with his fellow-man, and 
 man with his Maker. Be these always correct or 
 not, and I should be very far from affirming that 
 they always are so, the student of humanity, he 
 who because he is a man counts nothing human to 
 be alien to him, can never without wilfully forego 
 ing an important document, and one which would 
 have helped him often in his studies, altogether 
 neglect or pass them by. 
 
 But what, it may be asked before we proceed 
 further, is a proverb? Nothing is harder than a 
 definition. While on the one hand there is for the 
 most part no easier task than to detect a fault or 
 flaw in the definition of those who have gone before 
 us, nothing on the other is more difficult than to 
 
16 FORM AND DEFINITION OF A PROVERB. 
 
 propose one of our own, which shall not also present 
 a vulnerable side. Some one has said that these 
 three things go to the constituting of a proverb, 
 shortness, sense, and salt.- In brief, pointed sayings 
 of this kind, the second of the qualities enumerated 
 here, namely, sense, is sometimes sacrificed to allit 
 eration. I would not affirm that it is so here : for 
 the words are not ill-spoken, though they are very 
 far from satisfying the rigorous requirements of a 
 definition, as will be seen when we consider what 
 the writer intended by his three esses, which it is 
 not hard to understand. The proverb, he would 
 say, must have shortness / it must be succinct, n to 
 lerable in a breath. It must have sense, not being 
 that is, the mere small talk of conversation, slight 
 and trivial, else it would perish as soon as born, no 
 one taking the trouble to keep it alive. It must 
 have salt, that is, besides its good sense, it must in 
 its manner and outward form being pointed and 
 pungent, having a sting in it, a barb which shall 
 not suffer it to drop lightly from the memory.* 
 Yet, regarded as a definition, this of the triple s 
 
 * Compare with this Martial s so happy epigram upon epigrams, 
 in which everything runs exactly parallel to that which has been 
 aaid above : 
 
 "Omne epigramma sit instar apis; sit aculeus illi, 
 Sint sua mella, sit et corporis exigui;" 
 
 which may be indifferently rendered thus: 
 
 Three things must epigrams, like bees, have all 
 A sting, and honey, and a body small. 
 
BREVITY OF PROVERBS. 17 
 
 fails, as I have said ; it indeed errs in both defect 
 and excess. 
 
 Thus, in demanding shortness, it errs in excess. 
 It is, indeed, quite certain "that a good proverb will 
 be short as short, that is, as is compatible with the 
 full and forcible conveying of that which it intends. 
 Brevity, " the soul of wit," will be eminently tbe 
 soul of a proverb s wit. Oftentimes it will consist 
 of two, three, or four, and these sometimes mono 
 syllabic wor d s . Th u s : Extre mes meet / Rig li t 
 wrongs no man Forewarned, forearmed; with 
 a thousand more.* But still, shortness is only a rel 
 ative term, and it would, perhaps, be more accurate 
 to say that a proverb must be concise cut down, 
 that is, to the fewest possible words ; condensed, 
 quintessential wisdom. f But that, if only it fulfil 
 this condition of being as short as possible, it need 
 not be absolutely very short, there are sufficient 
 examples to prove. Thus, Freytag has admitted 
 tbe following, which indeed hovers on the confines 
 of the fable, into his great collection of Arabic 
 
 * The very shortest proverb which I know in the world is tin s 
 German : "Voll, toll;" which sets out very well the connection be 
 tween fullness and folly, pride and abundance of bread. In that 
 seeking of extreme brevity noted above, they sometimes become 
 exceedingly elliptical (although this is the case more with the an 
 cient than with the modern), so much so as to omit even the 
 vital element of the sentence, the verb. Thus: Xp/5/mr &vfip : "Sus 
 Minervam ;" "Fures clamorem;" "Meretrix pudicam;" "Amantes 
 nmentes." 
 
 f This is what Aristotle means when he ascribes avvro^u which 
 in another place he opposes to the S^KOS ye&wj to it. 
 
18 FORM AND DEFINITION OF A PRO VERB. 
 
 proverbs: " They said to the camel-bird [i.e., the 
 ostrich], Carry y it answered, ^ I can not, for 1 
 am a bird. They said c Fly y it answered, / 
 can not, for I am a camel. 7 : This could- not be 
 shorter, yet, as compared with the greater number 
 of proverbs, is not short.* Even so the sense and 
 salt, which are ascribed to the proverb as other of 
 its necessary conditions, can hardly be said to be 
 such ; seeing that flat, saltless proverbs, though 
 comparatively rare, they certainly are ; while yet, 
 be it remembered, we are not considering now what 
 are the ornaments of a good proverb, but the essen 
 tial marks of all. 
 
 And then, moreover, it errs in defect ; it has 
 plainly omitted one quality of the proverb, and that 
 the most essential of all I mean popularity ; ac 
 ceptance and adoption on the part of the people. 
 Without this popularity, without these suffrages and 
 this consent of the many, no saying, however brief, 
 however wise, however seasoned with salt, however 
 worthy on all these accounts to have become a prov 
 erb, however fulfilling all other its conditions, can 
 yet be esteemed as such. This popularity, omitted 
 
 * Let serve for further proof this eminently witty old German 
 proverb, which, despite its apparent length, has not forfeited its 
 character as such. I shall prefer to leave it in the original: "Man 
 spricht, an viererlei Leuten ist Mangel auf Erden : an Pfaffen, sonst 
 diirfte einer nit 6 bis 7 Pfruenden ; an Adelichen, sonst wollte nit 
 jeder Bauer ein Junker sein ; an Huren, sonst wurden die Hand- 
 werk Eheweiber und Nunnen nit treiben ; an Juden, sonst wiirden 
 Christen nit wuchern." 
 
APHORISilS NOT PKOVEKBS. 19 
 
 in that enumeration of the essential notes of the 
 proverb, is yet the only one whose presence is ab 
 solutely necessary, whose absence is fatal to the 
 claims of any saying to be regarded as such. 
 
 Those, however, who have occupied themselves 
 with the making of collections of proverbs have 
 sometimes failed to realize this to themselves with 
 sufficient clearness, or, at any rate, have not kept 
 it always before them ; and thus it has come to 
 pass, that many collections include whatever brief 
 sayings their gatherers have anywhere met with, 
 which to them have appeared keenly, or wisely, or 
 wittily spoken ;* while yet a multitude of these 
 have never received their adoption into the great 
 family of proverbs, or their rights of citizenship 
 therein : inasmuch as they have never passed into 
 general recognition and currency, have no claim to 
 this title, however just a claim they may have on- 
 other grounds to our admiration and honor. For 
 instance, this word of Goethe s, " A man need not 
 be an architect to live in a house," seems to me 
 
 * "When Erasmus, after discussing and rejecting the definitions of 
 those who had gone before him, himself defines the proverb thus, 
 "Celebre dictum, seita qua piam novitate, insigne," it appears to me 
 that he has not escaped the fault which he has blamed in others 
 that, namely, of confounding the accidental adjuncts of a good prov 
 erb, with the necessary conditions of every proverb. In rigor, the 
 whole second clause of the definition should be dismissed, and Cel 
 ebre dictum alone remain. Better Eifelein (Sprichwdrter des Deutsch- 
 en Volkes, Friburg, 1840, p. x.): "Das sprichwort ist ein mit offent- 
 lichen Gepaiige ausgemiinzter Saz, der seinen Curs und anerkannten 
 Werlh under dem Volke hat." 
 
20 FORM AND DEFINITION OF A PROVERB. 
 
 to have every essential of a proverb, saving only 
 that it has not passed over upon the lips of men. 
 It is a saying of manifold application ; a universal 
 law is knit up in a particular example : I mean 
 that gracious law in the distribution of blessing, 
 which does not limit our use and enjoyment of 
 things by our understanding of them, but contin 
 ually makes the enjoyment much wider than the 
 knowledge ; so that it is not required that one be 
 a botanist to have pleasure in a rose, nor a critic 
 to delight in Paradise Lost, nor a theologian to 
 taste all the blessings of Christian faith, nor, as he 
 expresses it, an architect to live in a house. And 
 here is an inimitable saying of Schiller s : " Heaven 
 and earth fight in vain against a dunce;" yet it is 
 not a proverb, because his alone ; although abun 
 dantly worthy to have become such,* moving as it 
 does in the same line with, though far superior to, 
 the Chinese proverb, which itself also is good : 
 One has never so much need of his wit, as when 
 he has to do with a fool. 
 
 Or, to take another example still more to the 
 point. James Ho well, a prolific English writer 
 of the seventeenth century, one certainly meriting 
 better than that almost entire oblivion into which 
 his writings have fallen, occupied himself much 
 with proverbs, and, besides collecting those of otli- 
 
 * It suggests, however, the admirable Spanish proverb, spoken, 
 no doubt, out of the same conviction : "Dios me de contiendn, con 
 quien me entienda." 
 
IIOWELL S COLLECTION. 21 
 
 ers, lias, himself set down "five hundred new say 
 ings, which, in tract of time may serve for proverbs 
 to posterity." As was to be expected, they have 
 not so done ; for it is not after this artificial method 
 that such are born ; yet many of these proverbs in 
 expectation are expressed with sense and felicity ; 
 for example : " Pride is a flower that grows in the 
 devil s garden ;" as again, the selfishness which 
 characterizes too many of them is not ill reproduced 
 in the following : "Burn not thy fingers to snuff 
 another man s candle ;" and there is, at any rate, 
 good theology in the following : " Faith is a great 
 lady, and good works are her attendants." Yet, 
 for all this, it would be inaccurate to quote these as 
 proverbs (and their author himself, as we have 
 seen, did not do more than set them out as prov 
 erbs upon trial), inasmuch as they have remained 
 the private property of him who first devised them, 
 never having passed into general circulation ; which 
 until men s sayings have done, maxims, sentences, 
 apothegms, aphorisms, they may be, and these of 
 excellent temper and proof; but proverbs, as yet, 
 they are not. 
 
 It is because of this, the popularity inherent in 
 a genuine proverb, that from such a one, in a 
 certain sense, there is no appeal. You will not 
 suppose me to intend that there is no appeal from 
 its wisdom, truth, or justice; from any word of 
 man s there may be such, but no appeal from it 
 
22 FORM AND DEFINITION OF A PKOVEEB. 
 
 as most truly representing a popular conviction. 
 Aristotle, who in his ethical and political writings 
 often finds very much more, always finds this in it. 
 It may not be, it very often will not be, a univer 
 sal conviction which it expresses, but ever one pop 
 ular and widespread. So far indeed from a uni 
 versal, very often, over against the one proverb 
 there will be another, its direct antagonist; and 
 the one shall belong to the kingdom of light, the 
 other to the kingdom of darkness. " Common 
 fame is seldom to blame ;" here is the baser prov 
 erb, for as many as drink in with greedy ears all 
 reports to the injury of their neighbors, being de 
 termined from the first that they shall be true. 
 But it is not left without its compensation: " They 
 say so* is half a liar :" here is the better word with 
 which they may arm themselves, who count it a 
 primal duty to close their ears against all such un- 
 authenticated rumors to the discredit of their breth 
 ren. " The nollest vengeance is to forgive :" here 
 is the godlike proverb on the manner in which 
 wrongs should be recompensed : " He who can not 
 revenge himself is weak, he who will not is vile:"* 
 here is the devilish. There are some lines of an 
 old English poet in praise of proverbs : 
 
 "The people s voice the voice of God we call; 
 And what are proverbs but the people s voice ? 
 Coined firs^ and current made by public choice 
 Then sure they must have weight and truth withal." 
 
 * "Chi non puo fare sua vendetta e debile, chi non vuole e vile." 
 
POPULARITY ESSENTIAL. 23 
 
 It will follow, from what has just been said, that 
 these, true in the main, will yet require to be taken 
 with certain qualifications and exceptions.* 
 
 Herein, in great part, the force of a proverb 
 lies, namely that it has already received the stamp 
 of popular allowance. A man might produce (for 
 what another has done he might do again) some 
 thing as witty, as forcible, as much to the point, 
 of his own ; which should be hammered at the 
 instant on his own anvil. Yet still it is not " the 
 wisdom of many ;" it has not stood the test of ex 
 perience ; it wants that which the other already 
 has, but which it only after a long period can ac 
 quire the consenting voice of many, and at dif 
 ferent times, to its wisdom and truth. A man em 
 ploying a long-recognised proverb is not speaking 
 of his own, but uttering a faith and conviction very 
 far wider than that of himself or of any single man ; 
 and it is because he is so doing that they, in Lord 
 Bacon s words, " serve not only for ornament and 
 delight, but also for active and civil use ; as being 
 the edge-tools of speech, which cut and penetrate 
 the knots of business and affairs." The proverb has, 
 in fact, the same advantage over the word now pro- 
 
 * Quintilian s words (Inst. 5, 11, 41), which are to the same effect, 
 must be taken with the same exceptions: "Neque enim durassent 
 hsec in aeternum, nisi vera omnibus viderentur;" and also Don 
 Quixote s: "Pareceme me, Sancho, que no ay refran qne no sea 
 verdadero, porque todas son sentencias sacadas dc la misma expe- 
 riencia, madre de las cieucias todas." 
 
24: FOKM AND DEFINITION OF A PKOVERB. 
 
 duced for the first time, which, for present currency, 
 and value, has the recognised coin of the realm 
 over the rude unstamped ore newly washed from 
 the stream, or dug up from the mine. This last 
 may possess an equal amount of fineness ; but the 
 other has been stamped long ago as already passed 
 often from man to man, and found free acceptance 
 with all :* it inspires, therefore, a confidence which 
 the ruder metal can not at present challenge. And 
 the same satisfaction which the educated man finds 
 in referring the particular matter before him to the 
 universal law which rules it, a plainer man finds in 
 the appeal to a proverb. He is doing the same 
 thing ; taking refuge, that is, as each man so gladly 
 does, from his mere self and single fallible judg 
 ment, in a larger experience and in a wider con 
 viction. 
 
 And in all this which has been urged lies, as it 
 seems to me, the explanation -of a sentence of an 
 ancient grammarian, which at first sight appears to 
 contain a bald absurdity, namely, that a proverb is 
 " a saying without an author." For, however with 
 out a known author it may, and in the majority of 
 cases it must be, still, as we no more believe in the 
 spontaneous generation of proverbs than of any 
 thing else, an author every one of them must have 
 
 * Thus, in a proverb about proverbs, the Italians say, with a true 
 insight into this its prerogative: "II proverbio s invecchia, e chi 
 vuol far bene, vi si epecchia." 
 
POPULARITY ESSENTIAL. 25 
 
 had. It might, however, and it often will have 
 been, that in its utterance the author did not pre 
 cipitate the floating convictions of the society round 
 him ; he did but clothe in happier form what others 
 had already felt, or even already uttered ; for often 
 a proverb has been in this aspect, " the wit of one 
 and the wisdom of many." And further, its consti 
 tutive element, as we must all now perceive, is not 
 the utterance on the part of the one, but the accep 
 tance on the part of the many. It is their sanction 
 which first makes it to be such ; so that every one 
 who took or gave it during the period when it was 
 struggling into recognition may claim to have had 
 a share in its production ; and in this sense, with 
 out any single author it may have been. From the 
 very first the people will have vindicated it for 
 their own. And thus, though they do not always 
 analyze the compliment paid to them in the use of 
 their proverbs, they always feel it; they feel that a 
 writer or speaker using these is putting himself on 
 their ground, is entering on their religion, and they 
 welcome him the more cordially for this.* 
 
 Let us now consider if some other have not some 
 times been proposed as essential notes of the prov- 
 
 * The name which the proverb bears in Spanish points to this 
 fact, that popularity is a necessary condition of it. This name is 
 not proverbio, for that in Spanisli signifies an apothegm, an aphor 
 ism, a maxim; but refran, which is a referenda, from the oftenness 
 of its repetition. The etymology of the Greek napai^ta is somewhat 
 doubtful, but it, too, means probably a trite, wavside saying. 
 
 2" 
 
26 FOEM AND DEFINITION OF A PROVKRB. 
 
 erb, which yet are in fact accidents, such as may be 
 present or absent without affecting it vitally. Into 
 an error of this kind they have fallen, who have 
 claimed for the proverb, and made it one of its 
 necessary conditions that it should be a figurative 
 expression. A moment s consideration will be suf 
 ficient to disprove this. How many proverbs, such 
 as Haste makes waste Honesty is the best policy, 
 with ten thousand more, have nothing figurative 
 about them. Here again the error has arisen from 
 taking that which belongs certainty to very many 
 proverbs, and those oftentimes the best and choicest, 
 and transferring it as a necessary condition, to all. 
 This much of truth they who made the assertion 
 certainly had ; namely, that the employment of the 
 concrete instead of the abstract is one of the most 
 frequent means by which it obtains and keeps its 
 popularity ; for so the proverb makes its appeal to 
 the whole man not to the intellectual faculties 
 alone, but to the feelings, to the fancy, or even to 
 the imagination, as well, stirring the whole man to 
 pleasurable activity. 
 
 By the help of an instance or two we can best 
 realize to ourselves how great an advantage it thus 
 obtains for itself. Suppose, for example, one were 
 to content himself with saying, " He may \vait till 
 he is a beggar, who waits to be rich by other men s 
 deaths ;" would this trite morality be likely to go 
 half so far, or to be remembered half so long, as 
 
FIGUEATIVE PEOVEEBS. 27 
 
 the vigorous comparison of this proverb: " He, who 
 waits for dead men s shoes may go barefoot f* Or 
 again, what were " All men are mortal," as com 
 pared with the proverb : Every door may he shut 
 hut death s door? Or let one observe: "More per 
 ish by intemperance than are drowned in the sea," 
 is this anything better than a painful, yet at the 
 same time a flat, truism? But let it be put in this 
 shape : JHfore are drowned in the wine-cup than in 
 the ocean y"f or again in this: More are drowned in 
 wine and in heer than in water ;t (and these both 
 are German proverbs) and the assertion assumes 
 quite a different character. There is something that 
 lays hold on us now. We are struck with the small- 
 ness of the cup as set against the vastness of the 
 ocean, while yet so many more deaths are ascribed 
 to that than to this ; and further with the fact that 
 literally none are, and none could be, drowned in 
 the former, while multitudes perish in the latter. 
 In the justifying of the paradox, in the extricating 
 of the real truth from the apparent falsehood of the 
 statement, in the answer to the appeal made here 
 to the imagination, an appeal and challenge which, 
 unless it be responded to, the proverb must remain 
 unintelligible tons in all this there is a process 
 of mental activity, oftentimes so rapidly exercised 
 
 * The same, xinder a different image, in Spanish: Larga soga tira, 
 ouien por muerte agena suspira. 
 
 f Im Becher ersaufen mehr, als im Meere. 
 
 \ In Wein und Bier ertrinken mehr denn im Wasser. 
 
28 FORM AND DEFINITION OF A PROVERB. 
 
 as scarcely to be perceptible, yet not the less carried 
 on with a pleasurable excitement.* 
 
 Let me mention now a few other of the more fre 
 quent helps which the proverb employs for obtain 
 ing currency among men, for being listened to with 
 pleasure by them, for not slipping again from their 
 memories who have once heard it; yet helps which 
 are evidently so separable from it, that none can be 
 in danger of affirming them essential parts or con 
 ditions of it. Of these rhyme is the most promi 
 nent. It would lead me altogether from my imme 
 diate argument, were I to enter into a disquisition 
 on the causes of the charm, which rhyme has for us 
 all ; but that it does possess a wondrous charm, that 
 we like what is like, is attested by a thousand facts, 
 and not least by the circumstance that into this 
 rhyming form a very great multitude of proverbs, 
 and those among the most widely current, have 
 been thrown. Though such will probably at once 
 be present to the minds of all, yet let me mention 
 a few : Good mind, good find; Wide will wear, 
 bat tight will tear; Truth maybe blamed, but 
 can not be shamed; Little strokes fell great oaks / 
 Women <$ jars breed men s wars; A. king^sface 
 should give grace ; East, west, home is best; 
 
 * Here is the explanation of the perplexity of Erasmus: Deinde 
 fit, nescio guo pacto, ut sententia proverbio quasi vibrata feriat 
 acrius nudiloris animum, et aculeos quosdam cogitationum relinquat 
 infixes. 
 
ALLITERATION IN PROVEKBS. 29 
 
 Who goes a-borrowing, goes a-sorrowing / with many 
 more, uniting, as you will observe several of tliem 
 do, this of rhyme with that which I have spoken of 
 before, namely, extreme brevity and conciseness.* 
 
 Alliteration, which is nearly allied to rhyme, is 
 another of the helps whereof the proverb largely 
 avails itself. Alliteration was at one time an im 
 portant element in our early English versification; 
 it almost promised to contend with rhyme itself, 
 which should be the most important; and perhaps, 
 if some great master in the art had arisen, might 
 have retained a far greater hold on English poetry 
 than it now possesses. At present it is merely sec 
 ondary and subsidiary. Yet it can not be called 
 altogether unimportant; no master of melody de 
 spises it ; on the contrary, the greatest, as in our 
 days Tennyson, make the most frequent, though 
 not always the most obvious use of it. In the 
 proverb you will find it of continual recurrence, 
 
 * So, too, in other languages: Qui prend, se rend; Qui se loue, 
 s emboue; chi va piano, va sano; Chi compra terra, compra 
 guerra; Quien se muda, Dios le ayuda; Wie gewonnen, so zer- 
 ronnen; and the Latin medieval: Qualis vita, finis ita; Via crucis, 
 via lucis. We sometimes think of rhyme as a modern invention, and 
 to the modern world no doubt belongs the discovery of all its capa 
 bilities, and the consequent large application of it. But proverbs 
 alone would be sufficient to show that in itself it is not modern, 
 however restricted in old times the employment of it may have 
 been. For instance, there is a Greek proverb to express that men 
 learn by their sufferings more than by any other teaching: Hanaro, 
 /mfl/^ara (Herod., i. 207); one which in the Latin, Nocumenta, docu- 
 menta, finds both in rhyme and sense its equivalent; to which evi 
 dently the inducement lay in the chiming and rhyming words. 
 
30 FORM AND DEFINITION OF A PROVERB. 
 
 and where it falls, as, to be worth anything, it must, 
 on the key- words of the sentence, of very high value. 
 Thus : Frost and fraud loth end in foul; Like, 
 lips, like lettuce; No cross, no crown; Out of 
 debt, out of danger ; Do in hill as you would do 
 in hall * that is, Be in solitude the same that you 
 would be in a crowd. I will not detain you with 
 further examples of this in other languages ; but 
 such occur, and in such numbers that it seems idle 
 to quote them, in all ; I will only adduce, in con 
 cluding this branch of the subject, a single Italian 
 proverb, which in a remarkable manner unites all 
 three qualities of which we have been last treating, 
 brevity, rhyme, and alliteration : Traduttori, tradi- 
 tori ; one which we might perhaps reconstitute in 
 English thus: Translators, traitors ; so untrue, for 
 the most part, are they to the genius of their origi 
 nal, to its spirit, if not to its letter, and frequently 
 to both ; so do they surrender, rather than render, 
 its meaning ; not turning, but only overturning it 
 from one language to another. f 
 
 A certain pleasant exaggeration, the use of the 
 figure hyperbole, is a not unfrequent engine with 
 the proverb to procure attention, and to make a 
 way for itself into the minds of men. Thus the 
 Persians have a proverb : A needle s eye is wide 
 
 * So in Latin: Nil sol et sale utilius. 
 
 f This is St Jerome s pun, who complains that the Latin versions 
 of the Greek Testament current in the church in his day were too 
 many of them not versiones, but eversiones. 
 
HYPERBOLE OF PROVERBS. 31 
 
 enough for two friends / the whole world is too 
 narrow for two foes ; and of a man whose good 
 luck seems never to forsake him, so that from the 
 very things which would be another man s ruin lie 
 extricates himself not merely without harm, but 
 with profit and with credit, the Arabs say : Fling 
 him into the Nile, and he will come up with a fish 
 in his mouth. We have here examples of hyper 
 bole in the proverb, a figure of natural rhetoric 
 which Scripture itself does not disdain occasionally 
 to employ. 
 
 In all this which I have just traced out in the 
 fact that the proverbs of a language are so fre 
 quently its highest bloom and flower, while yet 
 so much of their beauty consists often in curious 
 felicities of diction pertaining exclusively to some 
 single language, either in a rapid conciseness to 
 which nothing tantamount exists elsewhere, or in 
 rhymes which it is hard to reproduce, or in allitera 
 tions which do not easily find their equivalents, or 
 in other verbal happiness such as these lies the 
 difficulty which is often felt, which I shall myself 
 often feel in the course of these lectures, of trans 
 ferring them without serious loss, nay, sometimes 
 the impossibility of transferring them at all from 
 one language to another.* Oftentimes, to use an 
 
 * Thus in respect of this German proverb 
 "Stultus und Stolz 
 
 Wnchset aus Einem Holz" 
 its transfer into any other language is manifestly impossible. 
 
32 FORM AND DEFINITION OF A PROVERB. 
 
 image of Erasmus,* they are like those wines (for 
 instance, the Yaldepenas of Spain), of which the 
 true excellence can only be known by those who 
 drink them in the land that gave them birth. Trans 
 port them under other skies, or still worse, empty 
 them from vessel to vessel, and their strength and 
 flavor will in great part have disappeared in the 
 process. 
 
 Still, this is rather the case, where we seek de 
 liberately, and only in a literary interest, to trans 
 late some proverb which we admire from its native 
 language into our own or another. Where, on the 
 contrary, it has transferred itself, made for itself 
 a second home, and taken root a second time in the 
 heart and affections of a people, in such a case one 
 is continually surprised at the instinctive skill with 
 which it has found compensations for that which it 
 has been compelled to let go ; it is impossible not 
 to admire the unconscious skill with which it has 
 replaced one vigorous idiom by another, one happy 
 rhyme or play on words by its equivalent ; and all 
 this even in those cases where the extremely nar 
 row limits in which it must confine itself allow it 
 the very smallest liberty of selection. And thus, 
 presenting itself equally finished and complete in 
 
 * Unbent enini hoc peculiare pleraque proverbia, ut in ea lingua 
 sonare postulant in qua nata sunt ; quod si in alicnum Bermonem 
 demigraririt, multum gratia? decedat. Quemadmodum sunt et vina 
 qiircdam qure recusant exportari, nee gonnanam saporis gratiara 
 obtineunt, nisi in his locis in quibus proveniunt. 
 
TRANSPLANTING OF PROVERBS. 
 
 two or even more languages, the internal evidence 
 will be quite insufficient to determine which of its 
 forms we shall regard as the original, and which as 
 a copy. For example, the proverb at once German 
 and French, which I can present in no comelier 
 English dress than this 
 
 Mother s truth 
 Keeps constant use ; 
 
 but which in German runs thus : 
 
 Hutter-treu 
 Wird tdglich neu ; 
 
 and in French 
 
 Tendrcsse maternelle 
 Toujours se renouvelle ; 
 
 appears to me as exquisitely graceful and tender 
 in the one language as in the other ; while yet so 
 much of its beauty depends on the form, that be 
 forehand one could hardly have expected that the 
 charm of it would have survived its transfer to the 
 second language, whichever that may be, wherein 
 it found a home. Having thus opened the subject, 
 I reserve further remarks for the lectures which 
 follow. 
 
 2* 
 
34 THE GENERATION OF PROVERBS. 
 
 LECTURE II. 
 
 THE GENERATION OF PROVERBS. 
 
 WITH the form and definition of a proverb, my 
 first lecture was occupied. Let us proceed to con 
 sider, in the present, how far it may be possible to 
 realize to ourselves the processes by which a nation 
 gets together the great body of its proverbs, the 
 sources from which it mainly derives them, and the 
 circumstances under which such as it makes for 
 itself of new had their birth and generation. 
 
 And first, I would call to your attention the fact 
 that a vast number of its proverbs a people does 
 not make for itself, but finds ready made to its 
 hands; it enters upon them as a part of its intellec 
 tual and moral inheritance. The world has now 
 lasted so long, and the generations of men have 
 thought, felt, enjoyed, suffered, and altogether 
 learned so much, that there is an immense stock 
 of wisdom which may be said to belong to human 
 ity in common, being the fruits of all this its expe 
 rience in the past. Even Aristotle, more than two 
 thousand years ago, could speak of proverbs as the 
 fragments of an elder wisdom, which on account of 
 
ANTIQUITY OF PKOVEEBS. 35 
 
 their brevity and aptness, had amid a general wreck 
 and ruin been preserved. These, the common prop 
 erty of the civilized world, are the original stock 
 with which each nation starts ; these, either orally 
 handed down to it, or made its own by those of its 
 earlier writers who set it in living communication 
 with the past. Thus, and through these channels, 
 a vast number of Greek, Latin, and medieval prov 
 erbs live on with us, and with all the modern na 
 tions of the world. 
 
 It is, indeed, oftentimes a veritable surprise to 
 discover the venerable age and antiquity of a prov 
 erb, which we have hitherto assumed to be quite a 
 later birth of modern society. Thus we may per 
 haps suppose that well-known word which forbids 
 the too accurate scanning of a present, One must 
 not look a gift-horse in the mouth, to be of Eng 
 lish extraction the genuine growth of our own soil. 
 I will not pretend to say how old it may be, but it 
 is certainly as old as Jerome, a Latin father of the 
 fourth century ; who, when some found fault with 
 certain writings of his, replied with a tartness which 
 he could occasionally exhibit, that they were volun 
 tarily on his part, free-will offerings, and with this 
 quoted the proverb, that it did not behoove to look 
 a gift-horse in the mouth ; and before it comes to 
 us, we meet it once more in one of the rhymed 
 Latin verses, which were such great favorites in the 
 middle ages: 
 
36 THE GENERATION OF PROVERBS. 
 
 "Si quis dat mannos, ne quaere in dentibus aunos." 
 
 Again, Liars should have good memories is a 
 proverb which probably we assume to be modern ; 
 yet it is very far from so being. The same Jerome, 
 who, I may observe by the way, is a very great 
 quoter of proverbs, and who has preserved some 
 that would not otherwise have descended to us,* 
 speaks of one as unmindful of the old proverbs, 
 Liars should have good memories^ and we find 
 it ourselves in a writer a good deal older than him.} 
 
 Having lighted on one of those Latin rhymed 
 verses, let me, by the way, guard against an error 
 about them, into which it would be very easy to 
 fall. I have seen it suggested that these, if not the 
 source from which, are yet the channels by which, 
 a great many proverbs have reached us. I should 
 greatly doubt it. This much we may conclude 
 
 * Thus is it, I believe, with "Bos lassus for tins figit pedem;" a 
 proverb with which he warns the younger Augustine not to provoke 
 a contest with him, the weary, but therefore the more formidable, 
 antagonist. 
 
 f Oblitus veteris proverbii : mendaces memores esse oportere. 
 Let me quote here Fuller s excellent unfolding of this proverb: 
 " Memory in a liar is no more than neods. For first lies are hard 
 to be remembered, because many, whereas truth is but one; sec 
 ondly, because a lie cursorily told takes little footing and settled 
 fastness in the teller s memory, but prints itself deeper in the hear 
 ers, who take the greater notice because of the improbability and 
 deformity thereof; and one will remember the sight of a monster 
 longer than the sight of a handsome body. Hence comes it to pass 
 that when the liar hath forgotten himself, his auditors put him in 
 mind of the lie and take him therein." 
 
 \ Quintilian, Inst. 1. 4. 
 
RHYMED LATIN PROVERBS. 37 
 
 from the existence of proverbs in this shape, namely, 
 that since these rhymed or leonine verses went alto 
 gether out of fashion at the revival of a classical 
 taste in the fifteenth century, such proverbs as are 
 found in this form may be affirmed with a tolerable 
 certainty to date at least as far back as that period ; 
 but not that in all, or even in a majority of cases, this 
 shape was their earliest. Oftentime the proverb in 
 its more popular form is so greatly superior to the 
 same in this its Latin monkish dress, that the latter, 
 by its tameness and flatness, betrays itself at once 
 as the inadequate translation, and we can not fail 
 to regard the other as the genuine proverb. Many 
 of them are "so essentially Teutonic, that they fre 
 quently appear to great disadvantage in the Latin 
 garb which has been huddled upon them."* Thus, 
 when we have on one side the English, Hungry 
 bellies have no ears, and on the other the Latin 
 
 "Jejunns venter non audit verba libenter," 
 
 who can doubt that the first is the proverb, and the 
 second only its versification? or who would hesi 
 tate to affirm that the old Greek proverb, A rol 
 ling stone gathers no moss, may very well have 
 come to us without the intermediation of the medi 
 eval Latin 
 
 "Non fit hirsutus lapis hinc atque inde volutus?" 
 
 And the true state of the case comes out still more 
 
 * Kemble, Solomon and Saturn, p. 56. 
 
38 THE GENERATION OF PROVERBS. 
 
 clearly, where there are two of these rhymed Latin 
 equivalents for the one popular proverb, and these 
 quite independent of each other. So it is in re 
 spect of our English proverb, A bird in the hand 
 is worth two in the ~bush, which appears in this 
 form : 
 
 "Una avis in dextra melior quam quatuor extra:" 
 
 and also in this : 
 
 "Capta avis est pluris quam mille in gramine ruris." 
 
 Who can fail to see here two independent attempts 
 to render the same saying ? Sometimes the Latin 
 line confesses itself to be only the rendering of a 
 popular word ; thus is it with the following : 
 
 " Ut dicunt multi, cito transit lancea stulti :" 
 
 in other words : A fooVs bolt is soon shot. 
 
 Then, besides this derivation from elder sources, 
 from the literature of nations which as such now 
 no longer exist, besides this process in which a peo 
 ple are merely receivers and borrowers, there is 
 also, at somewhat later periods in its life, a mutual 
 interchange between it and other nations growing 
 up beside, and contemporaneously with it, of their 
 own several inventions in this kind ; a free giving 
 and taking, in which it is often hard, and oftener 
 impossible, to say which is lender and which bor 
 rower. Thus the quantity of proverbs not drawn 
 from antiquity, but common to all, or nearly all, 
 
NATIVITY OF TKOYERBS. 39 
 
 of the modern European languages, is very great. 
 The " solidarity" (to use a word which it is in vain 
 to strive against) of all the nations of Christendom 
 comes out very noticeably here. 
 
 There is indeed nothing in the study of proverbs, 
 in the attribution of them to their right owners, in 
 the arrangement and citation of them, which creates 
 a greater perplexity than the circumstances of find 
 ing the same proverb in so many different quarters, 
 current among so many different nations. In quo 
 ting it as of one, it often seems as if we were doing 
 wrong to many, while yet it is almost, or oftener 
 still altogether, impossible to determine to what 
 nation it first belonged, so that others drew it at 
 second hand from that one ; even granting that any 
 form in which we now possess it is really its oldest 
 of all. More than once this fact has occasioned a 
 serious disappointment to the zealous collector of 
 the proverbs of his native country. Proud of the 
 rich treasures which in this kind it possessed, he 
 has very reluctantly discovered, on a fuller investi 
 gation of the whole subject, how many of these 
 which he counted native, the peculiar heirloom and 
 glory of his own land, must at once and without 
 hesitation be resigned to others, who can be shown 
 beyond all doubt to have been in earlier possession 
 of them : while in respect of many more, if his own 
 nation can put in a claim to them as well as others, 
 yet lie is compelled to feel that it can put in no 
 
40 THE GENERATION OF PROVERBS. 
 
 better than, oftentimes not so good as, many com 
 petitors.* 
 
 This single fact, which it is impossible to ques 
 tion, that nations are thus continually borrowing 
 proverbs from one another, is sufficient to show, 
 that, however the great body of those which are 
 the portion of a nation may be, some almost as old 
 as itself, and some far older, it would for all this be 
 a serious mistake to regard the sum of them as a 
 closed account, neither capable of, nor actually re 
 ceiving, addition a mistake of the same character 
 as that sometimes made in regard to the words of a 
 language. So long as language is living, it will 
 be appropriating foreign words, putting forth new 
 words of its own. Exactly in the same way, so 
 long as a people have any vigorous energies at 
 work in the midst of them, are acquiring any new 
 experiences of life, are forming any new moral con 
 victions ; for the new experiences and convictions 
 new utterances will be found, some of the happiest 
 of wliich will receive that stamp of general allow 
 ance which shall constitute them proverbs. And 
 this fact makes it little likely that the collections 
 which exist in print, and certainly not the earlier 
 ones, will embrace all the proverbs in actual circu 
 lation. They preserve, indeed, many others all 
 
 * Kelly, in the preface to his very useful collection of Scotch prov 
 erbs, describes his own disappointment at making exactly such a 
 discovery as this. 
 
NEW PROVERBS RISK UP. 41 
 
 those which, having now become obsolete, would, 
 but for them, have been forgotten. But there are 
 not a few, as I imagine, which, living on the lips 
 of men, have yet never found their way into books, 
 however worthy to have done so; either because 
 the sphere in which they circulate has continued 
 always a narrow one, or that the occasions which 
 call them out are very rare, or that they, having 
 only lately risen up, have not hitherto attracted the 
 attention of any who cared to record them. It 
 would be well, if such as take an interest in the 
 subject, and are sufficiently well versed in the pro 
 verbial literature of their own country, to recognise 
 such unregistered proverbs when they meet them, 
 would secure them from that perishing, which, so 
 long as they remain merely oral, might easily over 
 take them ; and would make them, at the same 
 time, what all good proverbs ought certainly to be, 
 the common heritage of all.* 
 
 * The pages of the excellent Notes and Queries would no doubt 
 be open to receive such, and in them they might be safely garnered 
 up. That there are such proverbs to reward him who should care 
 fully watch for them, is abundantly proved by the immense addi 
 tion, which, as I shall have occasion hereafter to mention, a Spanish 
 scholar was able to make to the collected proverbs, so numerous be 
 fore, of Spain. Nor do there want other indications of the like kind. 
 Thus, the editor of very far the best modern collection of German 
 proverbs, records this one, which is found, as he affirms, in no pre 
 ceding collection, and which he himself never heard but once, and 
 then from the lips of an aged lay servitor of a monastery in the 
 Black Forest : Offend one monk, and the lappets of all cowls will 
 flutter as far as Rome (Beleidigestu einen Munch, so knappen alia 
 
4:2 THE GENERATION OF PROVE KBS. 
 
 And as new proverbs will be born from life and 
 from life s experience, so too there will be another 
 fruitful source of their further increase, namely, the 
 books which the people have made heartily their 
 own. Portions of these they will continually de 
 tach, most often word for word; at other times 
 wrought up into new shapes with that freedom 
 which they claim to exercise in regard of whatever 
 they thus appropriate to their own use. These, 
 having detached, they will give and take as part 
 of their current intellectual money. Thus, " Evil 
 communications corrupt good manners 1 1 is, word 
 for word, from a Greek comedy. It is not probable 
 that St. Paul had ever read this comedy ; but the 
 words, for their truth s sake, had been taken up into 
 the common speech of men ; and not as a citation, 
 but as a proverb, he uses them. And if you will, 
 from this point of view, glance over a few pages of 
 one of Shakespeare s more popular dramas Ham 
 let, for example you will be surprised, in case 
 
 Kuttenzipfel bis nach Rom); and yet who can doubt that we have 
 a genuine proverb here, and one excellently expressive of the com 
 mon cause which the whole of the monastic orders, despite their 
 inner dissensions, made ever, when assailed from without, with one 
 another? It is very easy to be deceived in such a matter, and one 
 must be content often to be so; but the following, which is current 
 in Ireland, I have never seen in print: "The man on the dyke 
 always hurls well ;" the looker-on at a game of hurling, seated indo 
 lently on the wall, always imagines that he could improve on the 
 strokes of the actual players, and, if you will listen to him, would 
 have played the game much better than they; a proverb of suffi 
 ciently wide application. 
 
J BOVEEBS FKOM BOOKS. 4:3 
 
 your attention has never been called to this before, 
 to note how much has in this manner been sep 
 arated from it, that it might pass into the e very-day 
 use and service of man ; and you will be prepared 
 to estimate higher than ever what he has done for 
 his fellow-countrymen, the "possession for ever" 
 which his writings have become for them. And 
 much, no doubt, is passing even now from favorite 
 authors into the flesh and blood of a nation s moral 
 and intellectual life ; and as " household words," 
 as parts of its proverbial philosophy, for ever incor 
 porating itself therewith. We have a fair measure 
 of an author s true popularity I mean, of the real 
 and lasting hold which he has taken on his nation s 
 heart, in the extent to which it has been thus done 
 with his writings. 
 
 There is another way in which additions are from 
 time to time made to the proverbial wealth of a 
 people. Some event has laid strong hold of their 
 imagination, has stirred up the depths of their moral 
 consciousness ; and this they have gathered up for 
 themselves, perhaps in some striking phrase which 
 was uttered at the moment, or in some allusive 
 words, understood by everybody, and which at 
 once summon up the whole incident before their 
 eyes. 
 
 Sacred history furnishes us with one example at 
 the least of the generation in this wise of a proverb. 
 That word, "Is Saul also among the prophets?" is 
 
THE GENERATION OF PEOVERBS. 
 
 one of which we know the exact manner in which 
 it grew to be " a proverb in Israel." When the son 
 of Kish revealed of a sudden that nobler life which 
 had hitherto been slumbering in him, alike un 
 dreamed of by himself and by others, took his part 
 and place among the sons of the prophets, and, 
 borne along in their enthusiasm, praised and proph 
 esied as they did, showing that he was indeed turned 
 into another man, then all that knew him before 
 hand, said one to another, some probably in sincere 
 astonishment, some in irony and unbelief, "Is Saul 
 also among the prophets?" And the question they 
 asked found and finds its application so often as 
 any reveals of a sudden, at some crisis of his life, 
 qualities for which those who knew him the longest 
 had hitherto given him no credit, a nobleness which 
 had been latent in him until now, a power of taking 
 his place among the worthiest and the best, which 
 none until now had at all deemed him to possess. 
 It will, of course, find equally its application, when 
 one does not step truly, but only affects to step sud 
 denly into a higher school, to take his place in a 
 nobler circle of life than that in which hitherto he 
 has moved. 
 
 Another proverb, and one well known to the 
 Greek scholar, The cranes of Ibycus* had its rise 
 in one of those remarkable incidents, which, wit 
 nessing for God s inscrutable judgments, are eagerly 
 
 * A.I ISvxov yipavoi. 
 
THE CKANES OF LBYCUS. 45 
 
 grasped by men. The story of its birth is indeed 
 one to which so deep a moral interest is attached, 
 that I shall not hesitate to repeat it, even at the 
 risk that Schiller s immortal poem on the subject, 
 or it may be the classical studies of some here, may 
 have made it already familiar to a portion of my 
 hearers. Ibycus, a famous lyrical poet of Greece, 
 journeying to Corinth, was assailed by robbers: 
 as he fell beneath their murderous strokes he looked 
 round if any witnesses or avengers were nigh. No 
 living thing was in sight, but a flight of cranes soar 
 ing high over head. He called on them, and to 
 them committed the avenging of his blood. A 
 vain commission, as it might have appeared, and 
 as no doubt it did to the murderers appear. Yet it 
 was not so ; for these, sitting a little time after in 
 the open theatre at Corinth, beheld this flight of 
 cranes hovering above them, and one said scoffingly 
 to another, "Lo, there, the avengers of Ibycus!" 
 The words were caught up by some near them ; for 
 already the poet s disappearance had awakened 
 anxiety and alarm. Being questioned, they be 
 trayed themselves, and were led to their doom; 
 and The cranes of Ibycus passed into a proverb, 
 very much as our Murder will out, to express the 
 wondrous leadings of God whereby the secretest 
 thing of blood is continually brought to the light. 
 
 Memorable words of illustrious men will fre 
 quently not die in the utterance, but pass from 
 
46 THE GENERATION OF PROVERBS. 
 
 month to mouth, being still repeated wiih com 
 placency, till at length they have received their 
 adoption into the great family of national proverbs. 
 Such were the gnomes or sayings of the Seven Wise 
 Men of Greece, supposing them to have been indeed 
 theirs, and not ascribed to them only after they 
 had obtained universal currency and acceptance. 
 So too a saying, attributed to Alexander the Great, 
 may very well have arisen on the occasion, and 
 under the circumstances, to which its birth is com 
 monly ascribed. When some of his officers reported 
 to him with something of dismay the innumerable 
 multitude of the Persian hosts which were ad 
 vancing to assail him, the youthful Macedonian 
 hero silenced them and their apprehensions with 
 the reply : One butcher does not fear many sheep 
 not in this applying an old proverb, but framing a 
 new, and one admirably expressive of the confi 
 dence which he felt in the immeasurable superior 
 ity of the Hellenic over the barbarian man ; and 
 this word, having been once set on foot by him, has 
 since lived on, and that because the occasions were 
 so numerous on which a word like this would find 
 its application. 
 
 And, taking occasion from this royal proverb, let 
 me just observe, by the way, that it would be a 
 great mistake to assume, though the error is by no 
 means an uncommon one, that because proverbs are 
 popular, they have therefore originally sprung from 
 
PKOVERBS OFTEN HIGII-BOEN. 47 
 
 the bosom of the populace. What was urged in 
 my first lecture of their popularity was not at all 
 intended in this sense ; and the sound, common 
 sense, the wit, the wisdom, the right feeling, which 
 are their predominant characteristics, alike contra 
 dict any such supposition. They spring rather from 
 the sound, healthy kernel of the nation, whether 
 in high place or in low ; and it is surely worthy of 
 note, how large a proportion of those with the 
 generation of which we are acquainted, owe their 
 existence to the foremost men of their time, to its 
 philosophers, its princes, and its kings ; as it would 
 not be difficult to show. And indeed the evil in 
 proverbs testifies to this quite as much as the good. 
 Thus, the many proverbs, in almost all modern 
 tongues, expressing scorn of the " villain," are alone 
 sufficient to show that, for the most part, they are 
 very far from having their birth quite in the lower 
 regions of society, but reflect much oftener the 
 prejudices and passions of those higher in the social 
 scale. 
 
 Let me adduce another example of the proverbs 
 which have thus grown out of an incident, which 
 contain an allusion to it, and are only perfectly 
 intelligible when the incident itself is known. It 
 is this Spanish : Let that which is lost be for God : 
 one the story of whose birth is thus given by the 
 leading Spanish commentator on the proverbs of 
 his nation : The father of a family, making his 
 
48 THE GENERATION OF PROVERBS. 
 
 will and disposing of Ins goods upon his death-bed, 
 ordained concerning a certain cow which had 
 strayed, and had been now for a long time missing, 
 that, if it were found, it should be for his children : 
 if otherwise, for God : and hence the proverb, Let 
 that which is lost be for God, arose. The saying 
 was not one to let die : it laid bare with too fine a 
 skill some of the subtlest treacheries of the human 
 heart ; for, indeed, whenever men would give to 
 God only their lame and their blind, that which 
 costs them nothing, that from which they hope no 
 good, no profit, no pleasure for themselves, what are 
 they saying in their hearts but that which this man 
 said openly Let that which is lost le for God. 
 
 The subject of the generation of proverbs, upon 
 which I have thus touched so slightly, is yet one 
 upon which whole volumes have been written. 
 Those who have occupied themselves herein have 
 sought to trace historically the circumstances out 
 of which various proverbs have sprung, and to 
 which they owe their existence; that so by the 
 analogy of these we might realize to ourselves the 
 rise of others whose origins lie out of our vision, 
 obscure and unknown. No one will deny the inter 
 est of the subject: it can not but be most interest 
 ing to preside thus at the birth of a saying which 
 has lived on and held its ground in the world, and 
 has not ceased, from the day it was first uttered, to 
 be more or less of a spiritual or intellectual force 
 
THEY FORGET THEIR PARENTS. 49 
 
 among men. Still the cases where this is possible 
 are exceedingly rare, as compared with the far 
 greater number where the first birth is veiled, as is 
 almost all birth, in mystery and obscurity. And 
 indeed it could scarcely be otherwise. The great 
 majority of proverbs are foundlings, the happier 
 foundlings of a nation s wit, which the collective 
 nation has refused to let perish, has taken up and 
 adopted for its own. But still, as must be expected 
 to be the case with foundlings, they can, for the 
 most part, give no account of themselves. They 
 rest on their own merits, not on those of their 
 parents and authors, whom they have forgotten, 
 and who seem equally to have forgotten them ; or, 
 at least, fail to claim them. Not seldom, too, when 
 a story has been given to account for a proverb s 
 rise, it must remain a question, open to much 
 doubt whether the story has not been subsequently 
 imagined for the proverb, rather than that the prov 
 erb has indeed sprung out of history.* 
 
 The proverb having thus had its rise from life, 
 however it may be often impossible to trace that 
 rise, will continually turn back to life again ; it will 
 attest its own practical character by the frequency 
 with which it will present itself for use, and will 
 
 * Livy s account of Cantherium in fossa, and of the manner in 
 which it became a rustic proverb in Italy (1. 23. c. 47), is a case in 
 point, where it is very hard to give credit to the parentage which 
 has been assigned to the saying. See Dodcrhin s Lat. Synoni/me, 
 v. 4, p. 289. 
 
 3 
 
50 THE GENERATION OF TKOYEIIBS. 
 
 have been actually used upon earnest and impor 
 tant occasions, throwing its weight into one scale or 
 the other at some critical moment, and sometimes 
 with decisive effect. I have little doubt that, with 
 knowledge sufficient, one might bring together a 
 large collection of instances wherein, at significant 
 moments, the proverb has played its part, and, it 
 may be, very often helped to bring about issues, of 
 which all would acknowledge the importance. 
 
 In this aspect, as having been used at a great 
 critical moment, and as part of the moral influence 
 brought to bear on that occasion for effecting a 
 great result, no proverb of man s can be compared 
 with that one which the Lord used when he met 
 his future apostle, but at this time his persecutor, 
 in the way, and warned him of the fnutlessness and 
 folly of a longer resistance to a might which must 
 overcome him, and with still greater harm to him 
 self, at the last : It is hard for thee to kick against 
 the pricks* (Acts xxvi. 14.) It is not always ob 
 served, but yet it adds much to the fitness of this 
 proverb s use on this great occasion, that it was 
 already, even in that heathen world to which ori 
 ginally it belonged, predominantly used to note the 
 madness of a striving on man s part against the supe 
 rior power of the gods ; for so we find it in the chief 
 passages of heathen antiquity in which it occurs.f 
 
 * S*-A77jO(5i/ aoi irpds Ktvrpa yaKTieii/. 
 
 f ^Eschylus, Prom. V. 322; Euripides, Bacch. 795; Pindar, Pyth. 
 2, 94-96. The image is, of course that of the stubborn ox, which, 
 
EMPLOYMENT OF PROVERBS. 51 
 
 I must take the second illustration of my asser 
 tion from a very different quarter, passing at a 
 single stride from the kingdom of heaven to the 
 kingdom of hell, and finding my example there. 
 We are told, then, that when Catherine de Medicis 
 desired to overcome the hesitation of her son Charles 
 the Ninth, and draw from him his consent to the 
 massacre, afterward known as that of St. Bartholo 
 mew, she urged on him with effect a proverb which 
 she had brought with her from her own land, and 
 assuredly one of the most convenient maxims for 
 tyrants that was ever framed : Clemency is some 
 times cruelty, and cruelty clemency. 
 
 Later French history supplies another and more 
 agreeable illustration. At the siege of Douay, 
 Louis the Fourteenth found himself with his suite 
 unexpectedly under a heavy cannonade from the 
 besieged city. I do not believe that Louis was 
 deficient in personal courage, yet, in compliance 
 with the entreaties of most of those around him, 
 who urged that he should not expose so important 
 a life, he was about, in somewhat unsoldierly and 
 unkingly fashion, immediately to retire ; when M. de 
 Charost. drawing close to him, whispered the well- 
 known French proverb in his ear: The wine is 
 drawn; it must ~be druiik.\ The king remained 
 
 when urged to go forward, recalcitrates against the sharp-pointed 
 iron goad, and, already wounded, thus only wounds itself the more. 
 * Le vin est verse" ; il faut le boire. 
 
52 THE GENERATION OF PROVERBS. 
 
 exposed to the fire of the enemy a suitable period, 
 and it is said ever after held in higher honor than 
 before the counsellor who had with tin s word saved 
 him from an unseemly retreat. Let this on the 
 generation of proverbs, with the actual employment 
 which has been made of them, for the present 
 suffice. 
 
NATIONAL HISTORY IN PROVERBS. 53 
 
 LECTURE III. 
 
 THE PROVERBS OF DIFFERENT NATIONS COMPARED. 
 
 " THE genius, wit, and spirit of a nation are dis 
 covered in its proverbs," this is Lord Bacon s well- 
 worn remark ; although, indeed, only well-worn 
 because of its truth. " In them," it has been fur 
 ther said, " is to be found an inexhaustible source 
 of precious documents in regard of the interior his 
 tory, the manners, the opinions, the beliefs,* the 
 customs of the people among whom they have had 
 their course." Let us put these assertions to the 
 proof, and see how far in this people s or in that 
 
 * The writer might have added, the superstitions; for proverbs 
 not a few involve and rest on popular superstitions, and a collection 
 of these would he curious and in many ways instructive. Such, for 
 instance, is the Latin (it is, indeed, also Gi eek) : A serpent, unless 
 it devour a serpent, grows not to a dragon (Serpens, nisi serpentem 
 comederit, non fit draco); which Lord Bacon moralizes so shrewdly ; 
 "The folly of one man is the fortune of another; for no man pros 
 pers so suddenly as by other men s errors." Such again is the old 
 German proverb: The night is no man s friend (Die Nacht ist 
 keines Menschen Freund); which rests, as Grimm has so truly ob 
 served (Deutsche MythoL, p. 713), on the wide-spread feeling in the 
 northern mythologies, of the night as an unfriendly and, indeed, 
 hostile power to man. And such, too, the French : A Sunday s 
 child dies never of the plague (Qui nait le ditnanche, jamais no 
 mcurt de peste). 
 
54 PROVERBS OF NATIONS COMPARED. 
 
 people s proverbs, its innermost heart speaks out to 
 us ; how far the comparison of the proverbs of one 
 nation with those of others may be made instruc 
 tive to us ; what this comparison will tell us sever 
 ally about each. This only I will ask, ere we enter 
 upon the subject, that if 1 should fail here in draw 
 ing out anything strongly characteristic, if the 
 proverbs regarded from this point of view should 
 not seem to reveal to you any of the true secrets of 
 national life, you will not therefore misdoubt those 
 assertions with which my lecture opened ; or assume 
 that these documents would not yield up their se 
 cret, if questioned aright ; but only believe that the 
 test has been unskilfully applied ; or, if you will, 
 that my brief limits have not allowed me to make 
 clear that which with larger space I might not have 
 wholly failed in doing. 
 
 I am very well aware that in following upon this 
 track, one is ever liable to deceive oneself, to impose 
 upon others, picking out and adducing such prov 
 erbs as conform to a preconceived theory, passing 
 over those which would militate against it. Quite 
 allowing that there is such a danger which needs 
 to be guarded against, and also that there are a 
 multitude of these sayings which can not be made 
 to illustrate difference, for they rest on the broad 
 foundation of the universal humanity, underlying 
 and deeper than that which is peculiar and national, 
 I am yet persuaded that enough remain, and such 
 
THE PROVERBS OF GREECE. 55 
 
 as may with perfect good faith be adduced, to con 
 firm these assertions; that we may learn from the 
 proverbs current among a people what is nearest 
 and dearest to their hearts, the aspects under which 
 they contemplate life, bow honor and dishonor are 
 distributed among them, what is of good, what of 
 evil report in their eyes, with very much more 
 which it can never be unprofitable to know. 
 
 To begin, then, with the proverbs of Greece. 
 That which strikes one most in the study of these, 
 and which the more they are studied, the more fills 
 the thoughtful student with wonder, is the evidence 
 they yield of a leavening through and through of 
 the entire nation with the most intimate knowledge 
 of its own mythology, history, and poetry. The in 
 finite multitude of slight and fine allusions to the- 
 legends of their gods and heroes, to the earlier inci 
 dents of their own history, to the Homeric narrative, 
 the delicate side glances at all these which the 
 Greek proverbs constantly embody,* assume an ac 
 quaintance, indeed a familiarity, with all this on 
 their parts among whom they passed current, which 
 almost exceeds belief. In many and most impor 
 tant respects, the Greek proverbs considered as a 
 whole are inferior to those of many nations of mod 
 ern Christendom. This is nothing wonderful ; 
 Christianity would have done little for the world, 
 
 * Thus Ai Joj Kvvrj* i AwXrjo-Toj iriOos. IXtaj KUKIOV. 
 
56 PROVERBS OF NATIONS COMPARED. 
 
 would have proved very ineffectual for the eleva 
 ting, purifying, and deepening of man s life, if it 
 had been otherwise. But, with all this, as bearing 
 testimony to the higli intellectual training of the 
 people who employed them, to a culture not re 
 stricted to certain classes, but which must have 
 been diffused through the whole nation, no other 
 collection can bear the remotest comparison with 
 this. 
 
 It is altogether different with the Roman prov 
 erbs. These, the genuine Roman, the growth of 
 their own soil, are very far fewer in number than 
 the Greek, as was indeed to be expected from the 
 far less subtle and less fertile genius of the people. 
 Hardly any of them are legendary or mythological ; 
 which again agrees with the fact that the Italian 
 pantheon was very scantily peopled as compared 
 with the Greek. Yery few have much poetry 
 about them, or any very rare delicacy or refine 
 ment of feeling. In respect of love indeed, not the 
 Roman only, but Greek and Roman alike, are im 
 measurably inferior to those which many modern 
 nations could supply. Thus a proverb of such re 
 ligious depth and beauty as our own, Marriages are 
 made in heaven, it would have been quite impossi 
 ble for all antiquity to have produced, or even re 
 motely to have approached. In the setting out not 
 of love, but of friendship, and of the claims which 
 it makes, the blessings which it brings, is exhibited 
 
NUMBER OF SPANISH PROVERBS. 57 
 
 whatever depth and tenderness they may have.* 
 Tills indeed, as has been truly observed,! was only 
 to be expected, seeing how much higher an ideal 
 of that existed than of this, the full realization of 
 which was reserved for the modern Christian world. 
 Yet the Roman proverbs are not without other sub 
 stantial merits of their own. A vigorous moral 
 sense speaks out in many ;; and even when this is 
 not so prominent, they wear often a thoroughly old 
 Roman aspect; being business-like and practical, 
 frugal and severe, wise saws such as the elder Cato 
 must have loved, such as must have been often 
 upon his lips ; while in the number that relate to 
 farming they bear singular witness to that strong 
 and lively interest in agricultural pursuits, which 
 was so remarkable a feature in the old Italian life.) 
 
 * In this respect the Latin proverb, Mores amici noveris, non 
 oderis, on which Horace has furnished so exquisite a comment (Sat, 
 i. 3, 24-93), and which finds its graceful equivalent in the Italian. 
 Ama Famico tuo con il difetto suo, is worthy of all admiration. 
 
 f By Zell, in his slight but graceful little treatise, On the proverbs 
 of the ancient Romans, Ferienschrif ten, v. 2, p. 1-96. 
 
 \ Thus, Noxa caput sequitur ; Conscientia, mille testes. 
 
 He has preserved for us that very sensible, and at the same 
 time truly characteristic one, Quod non opus est, asse carum est. 
 
 || These are two or three of the most notable the first against 
 " high farming," which it is strange if it has not been appealed to in 
 the modern controversy on the subject : Nihil minus expedit quam 
 agrum optime colere. (Pliny, H. N,, 6. 18.) Over against this, how 
 ever, we must set another, warning against the attempt to farm with 
 insufficient capital ; Oportet agrum imbecilliorem esse quam agri- 
 colam ; and yet another, on the liberal answer which the land will 
 make to the pains and cost bestowed on it ; Qui arat olivetum, rogat 
 fructum ; qui stercorat, exorat ; qui csedit, cogit. 
 
58 PROVERBS OF NATIONS COMPARED. 
 
 It will not be possible to pass under oven this 
 hastiest review more than two or three of the mod 
 ern families of proverbs. Let us turn first to the 
 proverbs of Spain. I instance these, because the 
 Spanish literature, poor in many provinces wherein 
 many others are rich, is probably richer in this 
 province than any other literature in the world, 
 certainly than any other in the western world ; and 
 this, I should be inclined to believe, both as respects 
 quantity and quality.* In respect of quantity, the 
 mere number of Spanish proverbs is astonishing. 
 A collection I have been using while preparing 
 these lectures, contains between seven and eight 
 thousand, and yet does not contain all ; for I have 
 searched it in vain for several with which from 
 other sources I had become acquainted. Nay, it 
 must be very far indeed from exhausting the en 
 tire stock, seeing that there exists a manuscript col 
 lection brought tegether by a distinguished Spanish 
 scholar, in which the proverbs have attained to the 
 almost incredible amount of from five and twenty 
 to thirty thousand. f 
 
 * This was the judgment of Salmasius, who says : Inter Europaeos 
 Ilispani, in his excellent, Itali vix cedunt, Galli proximo sequuntur 
 intervallo. 
 
 f "What may have become "of this collection I know not; but it 
 was formerly in Richard Heber s library (see the Catalogue, v. 9. N"o. 
 1697). Juan Yriarte was the collector, and in a note to the Cata 
 logue it is stated that he devoted himself with such eagerness to the 
 bringing of it to the highest possible state of completeness, that he 
 would give his servants a fee for any new proverb they brought 
 
CHARACTER OF SPAKISII PROVERBS. 59 
 
 And in respect of their quality, it needs only to 
 call to mind some of those, so rich in humor, so 
 double-shotted with sense, wherewith the squire in 
 Don Quixote adorns his discourse ; being often 
 times indeed not the fringe and border, but the 
 main woof and texture of it : and then, if we assume 
 that the remainder are not altogether unlike these, 
 we shall, I think, feel that it would be difficult to 
 rate them more highly than they deserve. And 
 some are in a loftier vein ; for taking, as we have a 
 right to do, Cervantes himself as the truest exponent 
 of the Spanish character, we should be prepared 
 to trace in the proverbs of Spain a grave thought- 
 fulness, a stately humor, to find them breathing the 
 very spirit of chivalry and honor, and indeed of 
 freedom too ; for in Spain, as throughout so much 
 of Europe, it is despotism, and not freedom, which 
 is new. Nor are we disappointed in these our 
 expectations. How eminently chivalresque, for in 
 stance, the following : White hands can not hurt.* 
 What a grave humor lurks in this : TJie ass knows 
 in whose face he lrays.\ What a stately apathy 
 how proud a manner of looking calamity in the 
 f ace speaks out in the admonition which this 
 
 him ; while to each, as it was inserted in his list, he was careful to 
 attach a memorandum of the quarter from which it came; and if 
 this was not from books but from life, an indication of the name, the 
 rank, the condition in life of the person from whom it was derived. 
 
 * Las inanos blancas no ofenden. 
 
 f Bien sabe cl asno en cuya cara rebozna. 
 
60 PROVERBS OF NATIONS COMPARED. 
 
 one contains : If thou seest thine house in flames, 
 approach and warm thyself by it* What a spirit 
 of freedom, winch refuses to be encroached on even 
 by the highest, is embodied in another : The king. 
 goes as far as he may, not as fa? as he would.-\ 
 
 We may, too, I think, remark how a nation will 
 occasionally, in its proverbs, indulge in a fine irony 
 upon itself, and -show that it is perfectly aware of 
 its own weaknesses, follies, and faults. This the 
 Spaniards must be allowed to do in their proverb, 
 Succors of Spain, or late or never. % However 
 largely and confidently promised, these succors of 
 Spain either do not arrive at all, or only arrive 
 after the opportunity in which they could have 
 served have passed away. Certainly any one who 
 reads the despatches of England s Great Captain 
 during the peninsular war, will find in almost every 
 page of them that which abundantly justifies this 
 proverb will own that those who made it read 
 themselves aright, and could not have designated 
 broken pledges, unfulfilled promises of aid, tardy 
 and thus ineffectual assistance, by a happier title 
 than Succors of /Spain. And then again, what a 
 fearful glimpse of those blood-feuds, which, having 
 once begun, seems as if they could never end, blood 
 touching blood, and violence evermore provoking 
 
 * Qunmlo vieras t casa quenmr, llega te a escalentar. 
 f El rey va hasta do puede, y no hasta do quiere. 
 \ Socorros de Espann, 6 tardc, 6 nunca. 
 
JUDGMENT OF ITALIAN PROVERBS. 61 
 
 its like, have we in the following : Kill, and thou 
 shalt be killed, and they shall kill him who kills 
 thee* 
 
 The Italians also are eminently rich in proverbs ; 
 and yet, if ever I have been tempted to retract or 
 seriously to modify what I shall have occasion by- 
 and-by to affirm in regard of a nobler life and spirit 
 as predominating in proverbs, it has been after the 
 study of some Italian collection. "The Italian 
 proverbs," it has ^ been said, not without too much 
 reason, though perhaps also with overmuch severity, 
 "have taken a tinge from their deep and politic 
 genius, and their wisdom seems wholly concen 
 trated in their personal interests. I think every 
 tenth proverb in an Italian collection is some cyn 
 ical or some selfish maxim, a book of the world for 
 worldlings. "f Certainly many of them are shrewd 
 enough, and only too shrewd ; inculcating a univer 
 sal suspicion, teaching to look everywhere for a 
 foe to expect, as the Greeks said, a scorpion un 
 der every stone glorifying artifice and cunning as 
 the true guides and only safe leaders through the 
 perplexed labyrinth of life ; :f and altogether seem- 
 
 * Mataras, y matarte ban, y mataran a quien te matare. 
 
 f Curiosities of Literature, p. 391. London: 1838. 
 
 ^ These may serve as examples: "Chi ha sospetto, di rado e in 
 difetto." "Fidarsi e bene, ma non fidarsi e meglio." "Da chi mi 
 fido, mi guardi Iddio ; da chi non mi fido, mi guardero io." " Con 
 arte e con inganno si vive mezzo 1 anno; con inganno e con arte si 
 vive 1 altra parte." 
 
62 rnovEitus OF NATIONS COMPARED. 
 
 ing dictated as by the very spirit of Machiavel 
 himself. 
 
 And worse than this is the glorification of re 
 venge which speaks out in too many of them. I 
 know nothing of its kind calculated to give one a 
 more shuddering sense of horror than the series 
 which might be drawn together of Italian proverbs 
 on this matter, especially when we take them with 
 the commentary which Italian history supplies, and 
 which shows them no empty words, but the deep 
 est utterances of the nation s heart. There is no 
 misgivings in these about the right of entertaining 
 so deadly a guest in the bosom ; on the contrary, 
 one of them, exalting the sweetness of revenge, de 
 clares, Revenge is a morsel for God.* There is 
 nothing in them (it would be far better if there 
 were) of blind and headlong passion, but rather a 
 spirit of deliberate calculation, which makes the 
 blood run cold. Thus one gives this advice : Wait 
 time and place to act thy revenge, for it is never 
 well done in a hurry /f while another proclaims 
 an immortality of hatred, which no spaces of inter 
 vening time shall have availed to weaken : Revenge 
 of a hundred years old hath still its sucking-teeth. \ 
 We may well be thankful that we have in England, 
 
 * Vendetta, boccon di Dio. 
 
 f Aspetta tempo e loco a far tua vendetta, che la non si fa mai ben 
 in fretta. Compare another: Vuoi far vendetta del tuo nemico, 
 governati bene ed 6 bell e fatta. 
 
 \ Vendetta di cent anni ha ancor i lattaiuoli. 
 
REMARKABLE ITALIAN PKOVEEBS. 63 
 
 at least as far as I am aware, no sentiments paral 
 lel to these, embodied as the permanent convictions 
 of the national mind. 
 
 How curious again is the confession which speaks 
 out in another Italian proverb, that the mainte 
 nance of the Romish system and the study of Holy 
 Scripture can not go together. It is this : With 
 the gospel, one becomes a heretic."^ No doubt, 
 with the study of the Word of God, one does be 
 come a heretic, in the Italian sense of the word ; 
 and therefore it is only done to put all obstacles in 
 the way of that study, to assign three years and 
 four years imprisonment, with hard labor, to such 
 as shall dare to peruse it ; yet certainly it is not a 
 little remarkable that such a confession should have 
 embodied itself in the popular utterances of the 
 nation. 
 
 But, while it must be freely owned that the 
 charges brought just now against the Italian prov 
 erbs are sufficiently borne out by too many, they 
 are not at all to be included in the common shame. 
 Very many there are not merely of a delicate re 
 finement of beauty, as this, expressive of the free 
 dom in regard of thine and mine which will exist 
 between true friends : friends tie their purses with 
 a spider s thread^ of a subtle wisdom which has 
 not degenerated into cunning and deceit, but also of 
 
 * Con 1 evangelo si diventa eretico. 
 
 \ Gli amici legono la borsa con un filo di ragnatelo. 
 
64: PROVERBS OF NATIONS COMPARED. 
 
 a nobler stamp. Honor and honesty, plain-dealing 
 and uprightness, have here their praises too, and 
 are not seldom pronounced to be in the end more 
 than a match for all cunning and deceit. How 
 excellent in this sense is the following: For an 
 honest man, half Ms ivits is enough, the whole is 
 too little for a knave : * the ways, that is, of truth 
 and uprightness are so simple and plain, that a lit 
 tle wit is abundantly sufficient for those that walk 
 in them ; the ways of falsehood and fraud are so 
 perplexed and tangled, that, sooner or later, all the 
 wit of the cleverest rogue will not preserve him from 
 being entangled therein. How often and how won 
 derfully has this found its confirmation in the lives 
 of evil men ! so true it is, to employ another prov 
 erb, and a very deep one, from the same quarter, 
 that The devil is subtle, but weaves a coarse web.\ 
 
 Again, what description of Egypt as it now is, 
 or indeed generally of the East, could s et us at 
 the heart of its moral condition could make us to 
 understand all which long centuries of oppression 
 and misrule have made of it and of its people? 
 what could do this so effectually as the collection of 
 Arabic proverbs now current in Egypt, which the 
 
 * Ad un uomo dabbene avanza la meta del cer cervello; ad un 
 tristo non basta ne nnche tutto. 
 
 f Jeremy Taylor appears to have found much delight in the prov 
 erbs of Italy. In the brief foot-notes which he has appended to the 
 Holy Living alone, I counted five and twenty such, to which he 
 makes more or less remote allusion in the text 
 
THE MODERN EGYPTIANS. 65 
 
 traveller Burckhardt gathered, and which, after his 
 death, were published with his name?* In other 
 books, others describe the modern Egyptians, but 
 here they unconsciously describe themselves. The 
 selfishness, the utter extinction of all public spirit, 
 the servility, which no longer, as with an inward 
 shame, creeps into men s acts, but utters itself 
 boldly as the avowed law of their lives, the sense 
 of the oppression of the strong, of the insecurity of 
 the weak, and generally the whole character of 
 life, alike the outward and inward, as poor, mean, 
 sordid, and ignoble, with only a few faintest glimpses 
 of that romance which one usually attaches to the 
 East ; all this, as we study these documents, rises 
 up before us in truest though in painfullest outline. 
 "Where, but in a land which evermore was 
 changing its rulers, and in which oftentimes the 
 unworthiest sat in highest places of all, whom yet 
 to propitiate was the only safety, where else could 
 the law $f baseness have proclaimed itself aloud, 
 and this have been laid down as the maxim of con 
 duct, If the monkey reigns, dance before him. The 
 monkey, it is true, may reign in other lands besides 
 those of the East ; but the examples in a neighbor 
 ing land, not merely of statesmen and warriors, 
 of men such as Guizot and Changarnier, but of 
 many more in every class, erect amid a too gen 
 eral prostration, abundantly testify, that, reign as 
 
 f Arabic Proverbs of the Modern Egyptians. London: 1830. 
 
66 PROVERBS OF NATIONS COMPARED. 
 
 the monkey may Simia in purpura, all will 
 not therefore count it their part and their wisdom 
 to dance before him. What indeed this dancing 
 is worth, another of those Eastern adages reveals, 
 which says, Kiss the hand which thou canst not 
 bite. Again, in no land save in one, where ru 
 lers, being evil in themselves, feel all goodness 
 to be their instinctive foe, and themselves, there 
 fore, entertain an instinctive hostility to it where 
 they punish, but never reward where not to 
 be noticed by them is the highest ambition of those 
 under their yoke, in no other land could a proverb 
 like the following, Do no good, and thou shaltfind 
 no evil, have ever come to the birth. How settled 
 a conviction that wrong, and not right, was the lord 
 paramount of the world, must have grown up in 
 men s spirits, before such a word as this (I know of 
 no sadder one) could have found utterance from 
 their lips.* 
 
 I have taken a wide circuit of nations ; with the 
 proverb of a people nearer home I must bring this 
 branch of the subject to an end. It is one, and a 
 very characteristic one, which the poet Spenser, 
 who long dwelt in Ireland, records as current in his 
 time among the Irish ; in which were contained 
 their offer of service to their native chiefs, with a 
 
 * Yet this very mournful collection of Burckhardt s possesses at 
 least one very beautiful proverb on the all-conquering power of 
 love : Man is the slave of beneficence. 
 
MANY PKOVERBS LOCAL. 67 
 
 statement of what they expected in return : Spend 
 me, and defend me. Their leaders in all times 
 have taken them only too well at their word in 
 respect of the first half of the proverb, and have not 
 failed prodigally to spend them ; although their 
 undertakings to defend have issued exactly as must 
 ever issue all promises on the part of others to de 
 fend men from those evils, from which none can 
 really protect them but themselves. 
 
 Other families of proverbs would each of them 
 tell its own tale, give up its own secret; but I 
 must not seek from this point of view to question 
 them further. I would rather bring now to your 
 notice that even where they do not spring, as they 
 can not all, from the centre of a people s heart, nor 
 declare to us the secretest things which are there, 
 but dwell more on the surface of things, in this 
 case also they have often local or national features, 
 which to study and trace out may prove both cu 
 rious and instructive. Of how many, for example, 
 we may note the manner in which they clothe them 
 selves in an outward form and shape, borrowed 
 from, or suggested by, the peculiar scenery or cir 
 cumstances or history of their own land ; so that 
 they could scarcely have come into existence, not 
 certainly in the shape which they now wear, any 
 where besides. Thus our own, Malte hay while 
 the sun shines, is truly English, and could have 
 had its birth onlv under such variable skies as 
 
68 rUOVEKBS OF NATIONS COMPARED. 
 
 ours not, at any rate, in those southern lands 
 where, during the summer time at least, the sun 
 always shines. In the same way there is a fine 
 Cornish proverb in regard of obstinate wrongheads, 
 who will take no counsel except from calamities, 
 who dash themselves to pieces against obstacles, 
 which, with a little prudence and foresight, they 
 might easily have avoided. It is this : lie who 
 will not be ruled ~by the rudder must be ruled ~by 
 the rock. It sets us at once upon some rocky and 
 wreck-strewn coast ; we feel that it could never 
 have been the proverb of an inland people. And 
 this, Do not talk Arabic in the house of a Moor : * 
 that is, because there thy imperfect knowledge will 
 be detected at once : this we should confidently 
 affirm to be Spanish, wherever we met it. So also 
 a traveller, with any experience in the composition 
 of Spanish sermons and Spanish ollas, could make 
 no mistake in respect of the following : A sermon 
 without Augustine is as a stew without ~bacon.^ 
 Thus Big and empty, like the Heidelberg tun,\ 
 could have its home only in Germany ; that enor 
 mous vessel, known as the Heidelberg tun, con 
 structed to contain nearly 300,000 flasks, having now 
 stood empty for hundreds of years. As regards, 
 too, the following, Not every parish-priest can wear 
 
 * En casa del Moro no babies algarabin. 
 
 f Sermon sin Agostino, oil a sin tocino. 
 
 \ Gross und leer, wie das IMdelbcrger Fuss. 
 
COSMOPOLITAN PKOVEKBS. 69 
 
 Doctor Luther s shoesf* we could be in no doubt to 
 what people it appertains. And this, The world is 
 a carcase, and they who gather round it are dogs, 
 plainly proclaims itself as belonging to those East 
 ern lands, where the unowned dogs prowling about 
 the streets of a city are the natural scavengers, that 
 would assemble round a carcase thrown in the way. 
 So too the form which our own proverb, Man s 
 extremity, God s opportunity, assumes among the 
 Jews, namely this, When the tale of ~bricks is doub 
 led, Moses comes,-^ plainly roots itself in the early 
 history of that nation, being an allusion to Exod. v. 
 9-19, and without a knowledge of that history, 
 would be unintelligible altogether 
 
 But while it is thus with some, which are bound 
 by the very conditions of their existence to a nar 
 row and peculiar sphere, or at all events move more 
 naturally and freely in it than elsewhere, there are 
 others, on the contrary, which we meet all the 
 world over. True cosmopolites, they seem to have 
 travelled from land to land, and to have made 
 themselves a home equally in all. The Greeks ob 
 tained them probably from the older East, and again 
 imparted them to the Romans ; and from these they 
 have found their way into all the languages of the 
 western world. 
 
 Much, I think, might be learned from knowing 
 
 * Doctor Luther s Schuhe sind nicht alien Dorfpriestern gerecht 
 f Cum duplicantnr lateres, Moses venit. 
 
70 PKOVEEBS OF NATIONS COMPAEED. 
 
 what those truths arc, which are so felt to be true 
 by all nations, that all have loved to possess them 
 in these compendious forms, wherein they may pass 
 readily from mouth to mouth : which, thus cast into 
 some happy form, have commended themselves to 
 almost all people, and have become a portion of 
 the common stock of the world s wisdom, in every 
 land making for themselves a recognition and a 
 home. Such a proverb, for instance, is Man pro 
 poses, God disposes /* one which I am inclined to 
 believe that every nation in Europe possesses, so 
 deeply upon all men is impressed the sense of 
 Hamlet s words, if not the words themselves: 
 
 "There s a divinity that shapes our ends, 
 Rough-hew them how we will." 
 
 Sometimes the proverb does not actually in so 
 many words repeat itself in various tongues. "We 
 have indeed exactly the same thought , but it takes 
 an outward shape and embodiment, varying accord 
 ing to the various countries and periods in which it 
 has been current ; we have proverbs totally diverse 
 from one another in their form and appearance, but 
 which yet, when we look a little deeper into them, 
 prove to be at heart one and the same, all these 
 their differences being thus only, so to speak, vari 
 ations of the same air. These are almost always 
 an amusing, often an instructive, study; and to 
 
 * La gente pone, y Dios dispone. Der Mensch denkt s; Gott 
 lenkt e. 
 
VARIOUS FORMS OF PROVERBS. 71 
 
 trace this likeness in difference lias an interest 
 lively enough. Thus the forms of the proverb, 
 which brings out the absurdity of those reproving 
 others for a defect or, a sin, to whom the same 
 cleaves in an equal or in a greater degree, have 
 sometimes no visible connection at all, or the very 
 slightest, with one another; yet, for all this, the 
 proverb is at heart and essentially but one. We 
 say in English : The kiln calls the oven, " Burnt 
 house;" the Italians, The pan says to the pot, 
 " Keep off, or you ll smutch me /"* the Spaniards, 
 The raven cried to the crow, " Avaunt, hlacJca- 
 moor ;"f the Germans, One, ass nicknames another, 
 " Long-ears f\ while it must be owned there is a 
 certain originality in the Catalan version of the 
 proverb : Death said to the man with his throat 
 cut, " How ugly you look" Under how rich a va 
 riety of forms does one and the same thought array 
 itself here. 
 
 Let me quote another illustration of the same 
 fact. "We probably take for granted that Coals to 
 Newcastle is a thoroughly English expression of 
 the absurdity of sending to a place that which 
 already abounds there -water to the sea, fagots 
 to the wood and English of course it is in the 
 outward garment which it wears ; but in its inner- 
 
 * La padella dice ai pajuolo, Fatti in la, che tu mi tigni. 
 f Dijo la corneja al cuervo, Quitate alia, negro. 
 \ Ein Esel schimpft den andern, Langohr. 
 
72 PROVERBS OF NATIONS COMPARED. 
 
 most being it belongs to tlie whole world and to all 
 times. Thus the Greeks said, Owls to Athens* 
 Attica abounding with these birds ; the rabbis, 
 Enchantments to Egypt, Egypt being of old es 
 teemed the headquarters of all magic ; the Orien 
 tals, Pepper to Hindostan and in the Middle Ages 
 they had this proverb, Indulgences to Rome 
 Rome being the centre and source of this spiritual 
 traffic ; and these by no means exhaust the list. 
 
 Let me adduce some other variations of the same 
 descriptions, though not running through quite so 
 many languages. Thus compare the German, Who 
 lets one sit on his shoulders, shall have him pres 
 ently sit on his head^ with the Italian, If thou 
 suffer a calf to be laid on thee, wtthin a little 
 they^ll clap on the cow ft and again, with the Span 
 ish, Give me where I may sit down / I will make 
 where I may lie down. They all three plainly 
 contain one and the same hint that undue liberties 
 are best resisted at the outset, being otherwise lia 
 ble to be followed up by other and greater ones ; 
 but this under how rich and humorous a variety 
 of forms. Not very different are these that fol 
 low. We say : Daub yourself with honey, and 
 
 * TXaiJKas LS A0/ji/?. 
 
 f Wer Bich auf der Achsel sitzen lasst, dera eitzt man nachher auf 
 dem Kopfe. 
 
 \ Se ti lasci mctter in spalla il vitello, quindi a poco ti inettcran 
 la vacca. 
 
 Dame donde me asiente, que yo hare donde me acueste. 
 
VARIOUS FORMS OF PROVERBS. 73 
 
 you ll ~be covered with flies the Danes: Make 
 yourself an ass, and you ll have every man s sack 
 on your shoulders while the French: Who makes 
 himself a sheep, the wolf devours him* and the 
 Persians : Be not all sugar, or the world will swal 
 low thee iip; to which they add, however, as its 
 necessary complement, nor yet all wormwood, or the 
 world will spit thee out.\ Or again, we are con 
 tent to say without a figure, The receiver s as lad 
 as the thief ; but the French, He sins as much who 
 holds the sack, as he who puts into it fy and the 
 Germans, He who holds the ladder is as guilty as 
 he who mounts the wall.% We say, A stitch in 
 time savs nine y the Spaniards, Who will not repair 
 his gutter, repairs his whole house.\ "We say, 
 Misfortunes never come single ; the Italians have 
 no less than three proverbs to express the same pop 
 ular conviction : Blessed is that misfortune which 
 comes single; and again, One misfortune is the 
 vigil of another y and again, A. misfortune and a 
 friar are seldom alone.^ Or once more, the Rus 
 sians say, Call a peasant "Brother" he ll demand 
 to he called "Father y" the Italians, Give a peasant 
 
 * Qui se fait brebis, le loup le mange. 
 
 f There is a Catalan proverb to the same effect: Qui de tot es 
 moll, de tot es foil. 
 
 J Autant peche celui qui tient le sac, que celui qtii met dedans. 
 
 Wer die Leiter halt, ist so schuldig wie der Dieb. 
 
 | Quien no adoba gotera, adoba casa entera. 
 
 Tf Benedetto e quel male, che vien solo. Un mal 6 la vigilia dell - 
 altro. Un male ed un Frate di rado soli, 
 4 
 
74: PEOVEEBS OF NATIONS COMPARED. 
 
 your finger, he ll grasp your fist* Many languages 
 have this proverb, God gives the cold according to 
 the cloth /f it is very beautiful, but attains not to 
 the tender beauty of our own, God tempers the 
 wind to the shorn lamb. 
 
 And, as in that last example, so not seldom will 
 there be an evident superiority of a proverb in one 
 language over one, which however resembles it 
 closely in another. Moving in the same sphere, it 
 will yet be richer, fuller, deeper. Thus our own, 
 A burnt child fears the fire, is good ; but that of 
 many tongues, A scalded dog fears cold water, is 
 better still. Ours does but express that those who 
 have suffered once will henceforward be timid in 
 respect of that same thing whence they have suffer 
 ed; but that other the tendency to exaggerate such 
 fears, so that now they shall fear even where no 
 fear is. And the fact that so it will be, clothes it 
 self in an almost infinite variety of forms. Thus 
 one Italian proverb says : A dog which has been 
 beaten with a stick, is afraid of its shadow and 
 another, which could only have had its birth in the 
 sunny south, where the glancing but harmless liz 
 ard so often darts across our path : Whom a serpent 
 ha-s bitten, a lizard alarms.^. With a little varia 
 tion from this, the Jewish rabbis had said long 
 
 * Al villano, se gli porgi il dito, ei prende la mano. 
 f Dieu donne le froid selon le drap. Cada cual siente el frio como 
 anda vestido. 
 
 \ Cui serpe mozzica, lucerta teme. 
 
RABBINICAL PKOYERBS. To 
 
 before : One bitten by a serpent, is afraid of a 
 ropers end ; even that which bears so remote a re 
 semblance to a serpent as this does, shall now in 
 spire him with terror ; and the Cingalese, still 
 expressing the same thought, but with imagery 
 borrowed from their own tropic clime : The man 
 who has received a beating from a firebrand, runs 
 away at sight of a firefly. 
 
 Some of our Lord s sayings contain the same les 
 sons which the proverbs of the Jewish rabbis con 
 tained already ; for he was willing to bring forth 
 even from his treasury things old as well as new ; 
 but it is very instructive to observe how they ac 
 quire in his mouth a dignity and decorum which, 
 it may be, they wanted before. We are all famil 
 iar with that word in the Sermon on the mount, 
 " Whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go 
 with him twain." The rabbis had a proverb to 
 match, lively and piquant enough, but certainly 
 lacking the gravity of this, and which never could 
 have fallen from the same lips : If thy neighbor 
 call thee an ass, put a packsaddle on thy back 
 do not, that is, withdraw thyself from the wrong, 
 but rather go forward to meet it. But thus, in 
 least, as in greatest, it was his to make all things 
 new. 
 
 Sometimes a proverb, without changing its shape 
 altogether, will yet on the lips of different nations 
 be slightly modified ; and these modifications, slight 
 
76 PROVERBS OF NATIONS COMPARED. 
 
 as often they are, may not the less be eminently 
 characteristic. Thus in English we say, The, river 
 past, and God forgotten, to express with how 
 mournful a frequency, he whose assistance was in 
 voked, it may have been earnestly, in the moment 
 of peril, is remembered no more, so soon as by his 
 help the danger has been surmounted. The Span 
 iards have the proverb too ; but it is with them ; 
 The river past, the saint forgotten^ the saints being 
 in Spain more prominent objects of invocation than 
 God. And the Italian form of it sounds a still sad 
 der depth of ingratitude : The peril past, the saint 
 mocked /f the vows made to him in peril remain 
 ing unperformed in safety ; and he treated some 
 thing as, in Greek story, Juno was treated by Man- 
 drab ulus the Samian ; who, having under her aus 
 pices and through her direction discovered a gold 
 mine, in his instant gratitude vowed to her a golden 
 ram ; which he presently exchanged in intention for 
 a silver one ; and again this for a very small brass 
 one ; and this for nothing at all ; the rapidly de 
 scending scale of whose gratitude, with the entire 
 disappearance of his thank-offering, might very 
 profitably live in our memories, as so perhaps it 
 would be less likely to repeat itself in our lives. 
 
 * El rio pasado, el santo olvidado. 
 f Passato il punto, gabbato il santo. 
 
MERITS OF PRO VERBS. 77 
 
 LECTUEE IY. 
 
 TUP] POETRY, WIT, AND WISDOM OF PROVERBS. 
 
 IT will be my endeavor in the three lectures 
 which I have still to deliver to justify the attention 
 which I have claimed on behalf of proverbs from 
 you, not merely by appealing to the authority of 
 others, who at different times have prized and made 
 much of them, but by bringing out and setting be 
 fore you, so far as I have the skill to do it, some of 
 the merits and excellencies by which they are 
 mainly distinguished. Their wit, their wisdom, 
 their poetry, the delicacy, the fairness, the manli 
 ness which characterize so many of them, their 
 morality, their theology, will all by turns come 
 under our consideration. Yet shall I beware of pre 
 senting them to you as though they embodied these 
 nobler qualities only. I shall not keep out of sight 
 that there are proverbs, course, selfish, unjust, cow 
 ardly, profane ; " maxims" wholly undeserving of 
 the honor implied by that name.* Still as my 
 pleasure, and I doubt not yours, is rather with the 
 
 * RcguljB quse inter maximas miinerari mereiitur. 
 
78 THE POETRY ETC. OF PROVERBS. 
 
 wheat than with the tares, I shall while I do not 
 conceal this, prefer to dwell in the main on the no 
 bler features which they present. 
 
 And first, in regard of the poetry of proverbs 
 whatever is from the people, or truly for the people, 
 whatever either springs from their bosom, or has 
 been cordially accepted by them, still more what 
 ever unites both these conditions, will have poetry, 
 imagination, in it. For little as the people s craving 
 after wholesome nutriment of the imaginative fac 
 ulty, and after an entrance into a fairer and more 
 harmonious world than that sordid and confused 
 one with which often they are surrounded, is duly 
 met and satisfied, still they yearn after all this with 
 an honest hearty yearning, which must put to shame 
 the pallid indifference, the only affected enthusiasm 
 of too many, whose opportunities of cultivating this 
 glorious faculty have been so immeasurably greater 
 than theirs. This being so, the proverbs being, as 
 we have seen, the sayings that have found favor 
 with the people, their peculiar inheritance, we may 
 be quite sure that there will be poetry, imagination, 
 passion, in them. So much we might affirm be 
 forehand ; our closer examination of them will con 
 firm the confidence which we have been bold to 
 entertain. 
 
 Thus we may expect to find that they will con 
 tain often bold imagery, striking comparisons ; and 
 such they do. Let serve as an example our own : 
 
IMAGERY IN PROVERBS. 79 
 
 Gray hairs are death s blossoms * or the Italian : 
 Time is an inaudible file ;\ or the Greek: Man a 
 bulMe^ which Jeremy Taylor has expanded into 
 such glorious poetry in the opening of the Holy 
 Dying; or that Turkish: Death is a black camel 
 which kneels at every man s gate ; to take up, that 
 is, the "burden of a coffin there ; or this Arabic one, 
 on the never satisfied eye of desire : Nothing but 
 a handful of dust will fill the eye of man ; or an 
 other from the same quarter, worthy of Mecca s 
 prophet himself, and of the earnestness with which 
 he realized Gehenna, whatever else he may have 
 come short in : There are no fans in hell y or this 
 other, also from the east : Hold all skirts of thy 
 mantle extended, when heaven is raining gold ; im 
 prove, that is, to the uttermost the happier crises 
 of thy spiritual life; or this one, current in the 
 Middle Ages : Whose life lightens, his words thun 
 der / or once more, this Chinese : Towers are 
 measured by their shadows, and great men l>y their 
 calumniators; however this last may have some 
 what of an artificial air as tried by our standard 01 
 the proverb. 
 
 There may be poetry in a play upon words ; and 
 such we shall hardly fail to acknowledge in that 
 
 * In German : Grau Hare sind Kirchkofsblumen. 
 j- II tempo una lima sorda. 
 
 i TLon<p6\v!- b avQpbiiros. 
 
 Cujus vita fulgor, ejus verba tonitrua. Cf. Mark iii. 17 : viol 
 
SO THE POETRY, ETC. OF PROVERBS. 
 
 beautiful Spanish proverb : La verdad essiempre 
 verde, which I must leave in its original form ; for 
 were I to translate it, The truth is always green, its 
 charm and chief beauty would be looked for in 
 vain. It finds its pendant and complement in an 
 other, which I must also despair of adequately ren 
 dering: Gloria vana florece, y no (jranaj which 
 would express this truth, namely, that vain glory 
 can shoot up into stalk and ear, but can never attain 
 to the full grain in the ear. Nor can we, I think, 
 refuse the title of poetry to this eastern proverb, in 
 which the wish that a woman may triumph over 
 her enemies, clothes itself thus : Jlfay her enemies 
 stumble over .her hair ; may she flourish so, may 
 her hair, the outward sign of this prosperity, grow 
 so rich and long, may it so sweep the ground, that 
 her detractors and persecutors may be entangled 
 by it and fall. 
 
 And then, how exquisitely witty many proverbs 
 are. Thus, not to speak of one familiar to us all, 
 which is perhaps the queen of all proverbs : The 
 road to hell is paved with good intentions * take 
 this Scotch one: A. man may love his house well 
 without riding on the ridge / it is enough for a 
 wise man to know what is precious to himself, with 
 out making himself ridiculous by evermore pro- 
 
 * Admirably glossed in the Guesses at Truth: "Pluck up the 
 stones, yc sluggards, and break the devil s head with them." 
 
WIT OF PROVERBS. 81 
 
 claiming it to the world ; or this of our own : When 
 the devil is dead, he never wants a chief mourner y 
 in other words, there is no abuse so enormous, no 
 evil so crying, but that the interests or passions of 
 some will be so bound up in its continuance that 
 they will lament its extinction ; or this Italian : 
 When rogues go in procession, the devil holds the 
 cross y* when evil men have it thus far their own 
 way, then worst is best, and in the inverted hier 
 archy which is then set up, the foremost in bad 
 ness is foremost also in such honor as is going. Or 
 consider this German one, in which the tender mer 
 cies of the feudal lords, of whom one is supposed to 
 be speaking, are excellently parodied : One must 
 l)e too hard on the peasants ; hew off his hands 
 and his feet.-\ Or, take another from the same 
 quarter, noting with slightest exaggeration a meas 
 ure of charity which is only too common : He will 
 swallow an egg, and give away the shells in alms. 
 
 The wit of prof erbs spares few or none. They 
 are, as may be supposed, especially intolerant of 
 fools. We say: Fools grow without watering ; no 
 need therefore of adulation or flattery, to quicken 
 them to a ranker growth ; and the Russians : Fools 
 are not planted or sowed y they grow of themselves y 
 while the Spaniards : If folly were a pain, there 
 
 * Quando i fnrbi vanno in processione, il diavolo porta la croce. 
 f Der Bauer ist nit zu verderben: mail hau ihm derm Hand und 
 Fuss ab. 
 
82 POETJJY, ETC., OF PROVERBS. 
 
 would 1)6 crying in every house j^ having further an 
 exquisitely witty one on learned folly as the most 
 intolerable of all follies : A fool, unless he knows 
 Latin, is never a great fool.\ And here is excel 
 lently unfolded to us the secret of the fool fi confi- 
 denceG Who knows nothing, doubts nothing.^ \ 
 
 The shafts of their pointed satire are directed 
 with an admirable impartiality against men. of 
 every degree, so that none of us will be found to 
 have wholly escaped. To pass over those, and they 
 are exceedingly numerous, which are aimed at 
 members of the monastic orders, I must fain hope 
 that this Bohemian one, pointing at the clergy, is 
 not true ; for it certainly argues no very forgiving 
 temper on our parts in cases where we have been, 
 or fancy ourselves to have been wronged. It is as 
 follows : If you have offended a clerk, kill him 
 else you never will have peace with him.\ And 
 another proverb, worthy to take its place among 
 the best even of the Spanish, tharges the clergy 
 with being the authors of the chiefest spiritual mis 
 chiefs which have arisen up in the church: By the 
 
 * Si la locura fuese dolores, en cada casa darian voces. 
 
 f Tonto, sin saber Latin, nunca es gran tonto. 
 
 \ Qui rien ne scait, de rien ne doute. 
 
 An earnest preacher of righteousness just before the Reformation 
 quotes this one as current about them : Quod agere veretur obsti- 
 natus diabolus, intrepide agit reprobus et con turn ax monachus. 
 
 I It is Huss who, denouncing the sins of the clergy of this day, 
 has preserved this proverb for us : Malum proverbium contra DOS 
 confinxerunt, dicentes, Si offenderis clericum, interface eum ; alias 
 nunquam habebis pacem cum illo. 
 
SATIRE OF PKOVEKBS. 83 
 
 vicar s skirts the devil climbs up into the ~belfry* 
 Nor do physicians appear in the Middle Ages to 
 have been in very high reputation for piety ; for a 
 Latin medieval proverb boldly proclaims : Where, 
 there are three physicians, there are two atheists.\ 
 And as for lawyers, this of the same period, Legista, 
 nequista,\ expresses itself not with such brevity 
 only, but with such downright plainness of speech, 
 that I shall excuse myself from attempting to ren 
 der it into English. Nor do other sorts and condi 
 tions of men escape. " The miller tolling with his 
 golden thumb," has been often the object of mali 
 cious insinuations ; and of him the Germans have a 
 proverb : What is holder than a miller s neckcloth, 
 which takes a thief hy the throat every morning f 
 Evenhanded justice might perhaps require that I 
 should find caps for other heads ; and it is not that 
 such are wanting, nor yet out of fear lest any should 
 be offended, but only because I must needs hasten 
 onward, that I leave this part of my subject without 
 further development. 
 
 What a fine knowledge of the human heart will 
 they often display. I know not whether this Per 
 sian saying on the subtleties of pride is a proverb 
 in the very strictest sense of the word, but it is 
 
 * For las haldas del vicario sube el diablo al campanario. 
 j- Ubi tres Medici, duo Athei. 
 \ In German: Juristen, bosen Christen. 
 
 Bebel : Dicitur in proverbio nostro ; nihil esse audacius indusio 
 molitoris, cum omni tempore matutino furem collo apprehendat. 
 
8-1 
 
 POETRY, ETC., OF PEOVERBS. 
 
 forcibly uttered : Thou shalt sooner detect an ant 
 moving in the dark night on the Uaok earth, than 
 all the motions of pride in thine heart. And on 
 the wide reach of this sin the Italians say : If pride 
 were as art, how many graduates ive should have * 
 and how excellent and searching is this word of 
 theirs on the infinitely various shapes which this 
 protean sin will assume: There are who despise 
 pride with a greater pride,\ one which might 
 almost seem to have been founded on the story of 
 Diogenes, who, treading under his feet a rich car 
 pet of Plato s, exclaimed, "Thus I trample on the 
 ostentation of Plato;" " With an ostentation of 
 thine own," was the other s excellent retort; even 
 as on another occasion he observed, with admira 
 ble wit, that he saw the pride of the cynic peeping 
 through the rents of his mantle: for indeed pride 
 can array itself quite as easily in rags as in purple ; 
 can affect squalors as earnestly as splendors ; the 
 lowest place and the last is of itself no security at 
 all for humility ; and out of a sense of this we very 
 well have said : As proud go behind as before. 
 
 Sometimes iu their subtle observation of life, 
 they arrive at conclusions which we would very 
 willingly question or reject, but to which it is im 
 possible to refuse a certain amount of assent. Thus 
 it is with the very striking German proverb : One 
 
 * Se la superbia fi>? so arte, quanti Dottori avressimo. 
 \ Tal sprezza lu snpcrbia con nna maggior superbia. 
 
LOVE OF PARENTS AND CHILDREN. 85 
 
 foe is too many ; and a hundred friends too few* 
 There speaks out in this a sense of how much more 
 active a principle in this world will hate be some 
 times than love. The hundred friends will wish 
 you well ; but the one foe will do you ill. Their 
 benevolence will be ordinarily passive ; his mal 
 evolence will be constantly active ; it will be ani 
 mosity, or spiritedness in evil. The proverb will 
 have its use, if we are stirred up by it to prove its 
 assertion false, to show that, in very many cases at 
 least, there is no such blot as it would set on the 
 scutcheon of true friendship. In the same rank of 
 unwelcome proverbs I must range this Persian one : 
 Of four things every man has more than he knows / 
 of sins, of debts, of years, and of foes ; and this 
 Spanish: One father can support ten children ; ten 
 children can not support one father which, in so 
 far as it rests upon a certain ground of truth, sug 
 gests a painful reflection in regard of the less 
 strength which there must be in the filial than in 
 the paternal affection, since to the one those acts of 
 self-sacrificing love are easy, which to the other 
 are hard, and often impossible. But yet, seeing 
 that it is the order of God s providence in the world 
 that fathers should in all cases support children, 
 while it is the exception when children are called 
 to support parents, one can only admire that wis 
 dom which has made the instincts of natural affec- 
 
 * Ein Feind 1st zu viel ; und hnndert Freunde sind zu wenig. 
 
86 POETRY, ETC., OF PliOVEBBS. 
 
 tion to run rather in the descending than in the as 
 cending line ; a wisdom to which this proverb, 
 though with a certain exaggeration of the facts, 
 bears witness. 
 
 How exquisitely delicate is the touch of this 
 French proverb : It is easy to go afoot when one 
 leads one s horse ~by the bridled How fine and 
 subtle an insight into the inner workings of the hu 
 man heart is here; bow many cheap humilities are 
 here set at their true worth. It is easy to stoop 
 from state, when that state may be resumed at will ; 
 easy for one to part w r ith luxuries and indulgences, 
 which he only parts with exactly so long as it may 
 please himself. ~No reason, indeed, is to be found 
 in this comparative easiness for the not going 
 afoot ; on the contrary, it may be to him a most 
 profitable exercise ; but every reason for not esteem 
 ing the doing so too highly, nor setting it in value 
 beside the trudging upon foot of him who has no 
 horse to fall back on whatever moment he may 
 please. 
 
 There is, and always must be, some rough work 
 to be done in the world ; work which, though 
 rough, is not therefore, in the least, ignoble ; and 
 the schemes, so daintily conceived, of a luxurious 
 society, which repose on a tacit assumption that no 
 body shall have to do this work, are touched with 
 a fine irony in this Arabic proverb : If I am 
 
 * II eat aise d aller a pied, quand on tient son cheval par la bride. 
 
FULLER S USE OF PROVERBS. 87 
 
 master and thou art master, who shall drive the 
 asses f * 
 
 Again, how clever is the satire of the following 
 Haytieii proverb, which, however, I must introduce 
 with a little preliminary explanation. It was one 
 current among the slave population of St. Domingo, 
 and with it they ridiculed the ambition and preten 
 sion of the mulatto race immediately above them, 
 who, in imitation of the French planters, must have 
 their duels too duels, however, which had nothing 
 earnest or serious about them, invariably ending in 
 a reconciliation and a feast, the kids which fur 
 nished the latter being in fact the only sufferers, 
 their blood that which alone was shed. All this 
 the proverb uttered: Mulattoes fight, Mds die.\ 
 
 And proverbs, witty in themselves, often become 
 wittier still in their application, like gems that ac 
 quire new brilliancy from their setting, or from 
 some novel light in which they are held. No wri 
 ter that I know of has a happier skill in thus adding 
 wit to the witty than Fuller, the church historian. 
 Let me confirm this assertion by one or two exam 
 ples drawn from his writings. He is describing the 
 indignation, the outcries, the remonstrances, which 
 the thousandfold extortions, the intolerable exac- 
 
 * The Galligan proverb, You a lady, I a lady, who shall drive the 
 hogs a-field? (Vos dona, yo dona, quen botara a porca fora?) is only 
 a variation of this. 
 
 f Mulates qua battent, cabrite qua morts. 
 
88 POETRY, ETC., OF PRO VERBS. 
 
 tions of the papal see gave birth to in England du 
 ring the reigns of such subservient kings as our 
 Third Henry ; yet he will not have his readers to 
 suppose that the popes fared a whit the worse for 
 all this outcry which was raised against them ; not 
 so, for The fox thrives best when he is most cursed;* 
 the very loudness of the clamor was itself rather an 
 evidence how well they were faring. Or again, he 
 is telling of that duke of Buckingham, well known 
 to us through Shakespeare s Richard the Third, 
 who, having helped the tyrant to a throne, after 
 ward took mortal displeasure against him ; this dis 
 pleasure he sought to hide, till a season arrived for 
 showing it with effect, in the deep of his heart, but 
 in vain ; for, as Fuller observes, It is hard to halt 
 before a cripple; the arch-hypocrite Richard, he 
 to whom dissembling was as a second nature, saw 
 through and detected at once the shallow Bucking 
 ham s clumsier deceit. And the Church History 
 abounds with similar happy applications. Fuller, 
 indeed, possesses so much of the wit out of which 
 proverbs spring, that it is not seldom difficult to tell 
 whether he is adducing a proverb, or uttering some 
 proverb-like saying of his own. Thus, I can not 
 remember ever to have met any of the following, 
 which yet sound like proverbs the first on soli 
 tude as preferable to ill-companionship : Better ride 
 
 * A proverb of many tongues beside our own : thus in the Italian : 
 Quanto piu la volpe e maladetta, tanto maggior preda fa. 
 
THE GLORY OF PKOVEKBS. 89 
 
 alone than have a thiefs company y* the second 
 against certain who disparaged one whose excellen 
 cies they would have found it very difficult to imi 
 tate : They who complain that Grantham steeple 
 stands awry, will not set a straighter by it,\ and in 
 this he warns against despising in any the tokens 
 of honorable toil : IMock not a cobbler for his black 
 thumbs. ^ 
 
 But the glory of proverbs that, perhaps, which 
 strikes "us most often and most forcibly in regard of 
 them is their shrewd common sense, the sound 
 wisdom for the management of our own lives, and 
 of our intercourse with our fellows, which so many 
 of them contain. In truth, there is no region of 
 practical life which they do not occupy, for which 
 they do not supply some wise hints and counsels 
 and warnings ; there is hardly a mistake w r hich in 
 the course of our lives we have committed, but 
 some proverb, had we known and attended to its 
 lesson, might have saved us from it. " Adages," 
 indeed, according to the more probable etymology 
 of that word, they are apt for action and use. 
 
 Thus, bow many of these popular sayings and 
 what good ones there on the wisdom of governing 
 the tongue : I speak not now of those urging the 
 duty^ though such are by no means wanting, but 
 
 * Holy State, B. 3, c. 5. f B. 2, c. 23. \ B. 3, c. 2. 
 
 Adagia, ad agendum apta; this is the etymology of the word 
 given by Festus. 
 
90 POETRY, ETC., OF PIIOVEKBS. 
 
 the wisdom, prudence, and profit, of knowing how 
 to keep silence as well as how to speak. The Per 
 sian, perhaps, is familiar to many : Speech is silvern, 
 silence is golden" with which we may compare the 
 Italian, lie who speaks, sows ; he who keeps silence, 
 reaps:* and on the safety that is in silence, I know 
 none happier than another from the same quarter, 
 and one most truly characteristic : Silence was 
 never written down ;f while, on the other hand, 
 we are excellently warned of the irrevocableness 
 of the word which has once gone from us in this 
 Eastern proverb : Of thine unspoken word thou art 
 master; thy spoken word is master of thee : even 
 as the same is set out elsewhere by many striking 
 comparisons : it is the arrow from the bow, the stone 
 from the sling; and, once launched, can as little 
 be recalled as these.:): Our own, He who says what 
 he likes, shall hear what he does not like, gives a 
 further motive for self-government in speech ; and 
 this Spanish is in a higher strain : The evil which 
 issues from thy mouth falls into thy hosom.% Nor 
 is it enough to abstain ourselves from all such 
 words ; we must not make ourselves partakers in 
 those of others, which it is only too easy to do ; for, 
 
 * Chi parla semina, chi tace raccoglie. 
 f II tacer non fu mai scritto. 
 
 Palabra de boca, piedra de honda. Palabra y piedra suelta no 
 tiene vuclta. 
 
 El mal quc dc tu boca sale, en tu senso se cac. 
 
WARNINGS IN PKOVEKBS. 91 
 
 as the Chinese have said very well : He who laughs 
 at an impertinence makes himself its accomplice. 
 
 And then, in proverbs not a few, what profitable 
 warnings have we against the fruits of evil com 
 panionship, as in that homely one of our own, lie 
 that lies down with dogs, shall rise up with fleas;* 
 or again, in the old Hebrew one, Two dry sticks will 
 set on fire one green or, in another from the East, 
 which belongs to the same theme, and plainly shows 
 whither such companionship will lead, He that takes 
 the raven for a guide, shall light upon carrion. 
 
 What warnings do many contain against unrea 
 sonable expectations, against a looking for perfec 
 tion in a world of imperfection, and generally a 
 demanding of more from life than life can yield. 
 We note very well the folly of one addicted to this, 
 saying, lie expects better bread than can be made 
 of wheat ; and the Portuguese, lie that will have 
 a horse without fault, let him go a-foot. Again, 
 what a good word of caution in respect of the wis 
 dom of considering oftentimes a step which, being 
 once taken, is taken for ever, lies in the following 
 Russian proverb : Measure thy cloth ten times ; 
 thou canst cut it but once. And in this Spanish the 
 final isues of procrastination are well set forth : Bij 
 the street of "I$ij-and-T)y" one arrives at the house 
 of "Never. r \ In how pleasant a way the avoiding 
 
 * Quien con perros se echa, con pxilgas se levanta. 
 f For la calle de despues se va a la casa de nunca. 
 
92 POETRY, ETC., OF PROVERBS. 
 
 of all appearance of evil is urged in the following 
 Chinese : In a field of melons tie not thy shoe / 
 under a plum-tree adjust not thy cap. And this 
 Danish warns us well against relying too much on 
 other men s silence, since there is no rarer gift than 
 the capacity of keeping a secret: Tell nothing to 
 thy friend which thou wouldst not have thine 
 enemy to know. Here is a word which we owe to 
 Italy, and which, laid to heart, might keep men out 
 of lawsuits, or, being in them, from refusing to ac 
 cept tolerable terms of accommodation : The robes 
 of lawyers are lined with the obstinacy of suitors* 
 Other words of wisdom and learning, for so I must 
 esteem them, are these ; this on the danger of being 
 overset by prosperity : Everything may be borne, 
 except good fortune ;f with which may be com 
 pared our own, Bear wealth, poverty will bear it 
 self; and another Italian, which says, In prosperity 
 no altars smoke.^. This is on the disgrace which 
 will, sooner or later, follow upon dressing ourselves 
 out in intellectual finery that does not belong to us : 
 Who arrays himself in other men s garments, they 
 strip him in the middle of the street ;$ he is de 
 tected and laid bare, when and where detection is 
 most shameful. 
 
 * Le vesti degl avvocati sono fodraet dell ostinazion dei Htignnti. 
 
 f Ogni cosa si sopporta, eccetto il bnon tempo. 
 
 \ Xella prosperita non fumano g altari. 
 
 Quien con ropa agena sc visfo, en la calle so queda oneucTos. 
 
SHREWD SENSE IN PROVERBS. 93 
 
 Of the same miscellaneous character, and derived 
 from quarters the most diverse, but all of them of 
 an excellent sense or shrewdness, are the following. 
 This from Italy : Who sees not the bottom, let him 
 not pass the water* This is current among the free 
 blacks of Hayti : Before crossing the river, do not 
 curse the crocodiles mother ;f provoke not wan 
 tonly those in whose power you presently may be. 
 This is Spanish : Call me not " olive" till you see 
 Trie gathered;^, being nearly parallel to our own, 
 Praise a fair day at night; and this French, Take 
 the first advice of a icoman, and not the second / a 1 
 proverb of much wisdom; for in processes of rea- 1 
 soning, out of which the second counsels would 
 spring, women may and will be inferior to us ; but 
 in intuitions, in moral intuitions above all, they sur 
 pass us far ; they have what Montaigne ascribes to 
 them in a remarkable word, V esprit primesautier^ 
 the leopard s spring, which takes its prey, if it be to 
 take it at all, at the first bound. 
 
 And I can not but think, that, for as many as are 
 seeking diligently to improve their time and oppor 
 tunities of knowledge, with, at the same time, little 
 
 * Chi non vede il tondo, no passi 1 acqua. 
 
 f Avant traverse^ rivier, pas jure maman caiman. This and one 
 or two other Haytien proverbs quoted in this volume I have derived 
 from a curious article, Les mceurs et la litterature negres, by Gustave 
 D Alaux, iu the Revue des deux Mondes, Mai 15 me , 1852. 
 
 | No me digas oliva, hasta que me veas cogida. 
 
 Prends le premier conseil d une femme, et non le second. 
 
94: POETRY, ETC., OF PROVERBS. 
 
 of either wliicli they can call their own, a very 
 useful hint and warning against an error which lies 
 very near, is contained in the little Latin proverb, 
 Compendia, dispendia. Nor indeed for them only, 
 but for all, and in numberless respects it often 
 proves true that a short cut may be a very long 
 way home ; yet the proverb can never be applied 
 better than to those little catechisms of science, 
 those skeleton outlines of history, those epitomes 
 of all useful information, those thousand delusive 
 short-cuts to the attainment of that knowledge 
 which can indeed only be acquired by them that 
 travel on the king s highway on the old, and as I 
 must still call it, the royal road of patience, perse 
 verance, and toil. Surely these compendia, so mea 
 ger and so hungry, with little food for the intellect, 
 with less for the affections, we may style with ful 
 lest right dispendia, wasteful as they generally 
 prove of whatever time and labor and money is 
 bestowed upon them. 
 
 And being on the subject of books and the choice 
 of books, let me put before you a proverb, and in 
 this reading age a very serious one ; it comes to us 
 from Italy, and it says, There is no worse rolJber 
 than a bad book* Indeed, none worse, nor so bad ; 
 other robbers may spoil us of our money ; but this 
 one of our " goods" of our time at any rate, even 
 assuming the book to be only negatively bad ; but 
 
 * Non v il peggior ladro d tm cattivo libro. 
 
PKUDENT WORDS ON EDUCATION. 95 
 
 of how much more, of our principles, our faith, our 
 purity of heart, supposing its badness to be positive, 
 and not negative only. 
 
 Here are one or two prudent words on educa 
 tion. A child may have too much of its mother s 
 blessing yes, for that blessing may be no blessing, 
 but rather a curse, if it take the shape of foolish 
 and fond indulgence ; and in the same strain is this 
 German : Setter the child weep than the father* 
 And this, like many others, is found in so many 
 tongues, that it can not be ascribed to one rather 
 than another : More springs in the garden than the 
 gardener ever sowed.\ It is a proverb for many, 
 but most of all for parents and teachers, that they 
 lap not themselves in a false dream of security, as 
 though nothing was at work or growing in the 
 minds of the young in their guardianship, but what 
 they themselves had sown there, as though there 
 was not another who might very well have sown 
 his tares beside and among any good seed of their 
 sowing. At the same time the proverb has also its 
 happier side. There may be, there often are, better 
 things also in this garden than ever the earthly 
 gardener set there, seeds of the more immediate 
 sowing of God. In either of its aspects this prov 
 erb is one deserving to be laid to heart. 
 
 Proverbs will sometimes outrun and implicitly 
 
 * Es ist besser, dns Kind weine denn der Vater. 
 \ Nace en la huerta lo que no siembra el hortelano. 
 
96 POETRY, ETC., OF PROVERBS. 
 
 anticipate conclusions, which are only after long 
 struggles and efforts arrived at as the formal and 
 undoubted conviction of all thoughtful men. After 
 how long a conflict has that been established as a 
 maxim in political economy, which the brief Italian 
 proverb long ago announced : Gold s worth is gold.* 
 What millions upon millions of national wealth have 
 been as good as thrown into the sea, from the ina 
 bility of those who have had the destinies of na 
 tions in their hands to grasp this simple proposition, 
 that everything which could purchase money, or 
 which money would fain purchase, was as really 
 wealth as the money itself. What forcing of na 
 tional industries into unnatural channels has re 
 sulted from this ! what mischievous restrictions in 
 the buying and selling of one people with another ! 
 ISTay, can the truth which this proverb affirms be 
 said even now to be accepted without gainsaying 
 so long as the talk about the balance of trade being 
 in favor of or against a nation, as the fear of drain 
 ing a country of its gold, still survive? 
 
 Here is a proverb of many tongues : One sword 
 keeps another in its scabbard;* surely a far wiser 
 and far manlier word than the puling yet mischie 
 vous babble of our shallow peace societies, which, 
 
 * Oro c, che oro vale; and of the multitudes that are rushing to 
 the Australian gold-fields, some may find this also true: Piu vale 
 guadagnar in loto che perder in oro. 
 
 * Una spada tien 1 altra nel fodro. 
 
THE SWOKD-BEAKER. 97 
 
 while they fancy that they embody, and they only 
 embody, the true spirit of Christianity, proclaim 
 themselves in fact ignorant of all which it teaches ; 
 for they dream of having peace the fruit, while at 
 the same time the root of bitterness out of which 
 have grown all the wars and fightings that have 
 ever been in the world, namely the lusts which stir 
 in men s members, remain strong and vigorous as 
 ever. But no ; it is not they that are the peace 
 makers : in the face of an evil world, and of a world 
 determined to continue in its evil, He who bears the 
 sword and though he fain would not, yet knows 
 how, if need be, to wield it bears peace.* 
 
 Let me add another proverb, bearing on a subject 
 which is occupying all patriot hearts in England at 
 this present time : Far-off water will not quench 
 near fire.\ They who watch, and are answerable 
 to their fellow-countrymen, for the safety of this our 
 beloved land, and not for its safety only, but the 
 inviolated honor of its shores, have laid to heart, if 
 not the proverb, yet at all events the truth which 
 it embodies, having resolved that an English fleet 
 shall guard our English coasts. And this is well ; 
 for let us only suppose that a blow were struck at 
 this mighty s empire s heart, at the home and sanc 
 tuary of its greatness no improbable supposition, 
 when force and fraud are met together, and are 
 
 * Qui porte pee, porte paix. 
 
 j- Acqua lontana non spegne fuoco vicino. 
 
 5 
 
98 POETRY, ETC., OF PKOYEKBS. 
 
 watching tlieii 1 opportunity to strike it what profit 
 would it then be that the mighty armaments of 
 England covered the distant seas, that her soldiers 
 were winning comparatively barren victories in 
 Africa and the East? The far-off water, as this 
 proverb warns us, would altogether be useless for 
 quenching the near fire. 
 
 One of the most remarkable features of a good 
 proverb is the singular variety of applications which 
 it will admit, which indeed it challenges and invites. 
 Not lying on the surface of things, but going deep 
 down to their heart, it will be found capable of be 
 ing applied again and again, under circumstances 
 the most different ; like the gift of which Solomon 
 spake, " whithersoever it turneth, it prospereth ;" 
 or like a diamond cut and polished upon many 
 sides, which reflects and refracts the light upon 
 every one. There can be no greater mistake than 
 the attempt to tie it down and restrict it to a single 
 application, when indeed the very character of it is 
 that it is ever finding or making new ones for itself. 
 
 It is nothing strange that, with words of Eternal 
 Wisdom, this should be so, and, in respect of them, 
 my assertion can not need a proof. I will, notwith 
 standing, adduce as a first confirmation of it a 
 scriptural proverb, one which fell from the Lord s 
 lips in his last prophecies about Jerusalem, Where 
 soever the carcase is, there will the eagles l>e gath 
 ered together (Matt. xxiv. 28), and which probably 
 
THE CARCASE AND THE, EAGLES. 99 
 
 he had taken up from Job xxxix. 30. Who would 
 venture to say that he had exhausted the meaning 
 of tlds wonderful saying? For is it not properly 
 inexhaustible? All history is a comment on these 
 words. Wherever there is a church or a people 
 abandoned by the spirit of life, and so a carcase, 
 tainting the atmosphere of God s moral world, 
 around it assemble the ministers and messengers 
 of Divine justice, "the eagles" (or vultures, more 
 strictly, for the true eagle does not feed on aught 
 but what itself has slain), the scavengers of God s 
 moral world, scenting out as by a mysterious in 
 stinct the prey from afar, and charged to remove 
 presently the offence out of the way. This prov 
 erb, for the saying has passed upon the lips of men, 
 and thus has become such, is being fulfilled ever 
 more. The wicked Canaanites were the carcase, 
 when the children of Israel entered into their land, 
 the commissioned eagles that should remove them 
 out of sight. At a later day the Jews were them 
 selves the carcase, and the Romans the eagles; and 
 when, in the progress of decay, the Roman empire 
 had quite lost the spirit of life, and those virtues of 
 the family and the nation which had deservedly 
 made it great, the northern tribes, the eagles now, 
 came down upon it, to tear it limb from limb, and 
 make room for a new creation that should grow up 
 in its stead. Again, the Persian empire was the 
 carcase ; Alexander and his Macedonian hosts the 
 
100 POETRY, ETC., OF PROVERBS. 
 
 eagles that by unerring instinct gathered round it 
 to complete its doom. The Greek church in the 
 seventh century was too nearly a carcase to escape 
 the destiny of such, and the armies of Islam scented 
 their prey, and divided it among them. In modern 
 times, Poland was, I fear, such a carcase ; and this 
 one may affirm, without in the least extenuating 
 their guilt who partitioned it; for it might have 
 been just for it to suffer, what yet it was most un 
 righteous for others to inflict. Nay, where do you 
 not find an illustration of this proverb, from such 
 instances on the largest scale as these, down to that 
 of the silly and profligate heir, surrounded by sharp 
 ers and blacklegs, and preyed on by these ? Every 
 where it is true that Wheresoever the carcase is, 
 there will the eagles be gathered together. 
 
 Or, again, consider such a proverb as the short 
 but well-known one, Extremes meet. Short as it 
 is, it is yet a motto on which whole volumes might 
 be written, which is finding its illustration every 
 day, in small and in great, in things trivial and in 
 things most important, in the histories of single 
 men, and in those of nations and of churches. Con 
 sider some of its every-day fulfilments old age 
 ending in second childhood ; cold performing the 
 effects of heat, and scorching as lieat would have 
 done; the extremities of joy and of grief alike 
 finding utterance in tears ; the second singular 
 "thou" instead of the plural "you," employed in 
 
EXTREMES MEET. 101 
 
 so many languages to inferiors and to God, never 
 to equals ; just as servants and children are alike 
 called by the Christian name, but not those who 
 stand in the midway of intimacy between them. 
 Or to take some further illustrations from the moral 
 world, of extremes meeting; observe how often 
 those who begin their lives as spendthrifts end 
 them as misers ; how often the flatterer and the 
 calumniator meet in the same person ; out of a 
 sense of which the Italians say well, Who paints 
 me "before, Slackens me behind y* observe how those 
 who yesterday would have sacrificed to Paul as a 
 god will to-day stone him as a malefactor (Acts xiv. 
 18, 19 : cf. xxviii. 4-6) ; even as Roman emperors 
 would one day have blasphemous honors paid to 
 them by the populace, and the next their bodies 
 would be dragged by a hook through the streets of 
 the city, to be flung into the common sewer. Or 
 note asrain in what close alliance hardness and soft- 
 
 S 
 
 ness, cruelty and self-indulgence ("lust hard by 
 hate"), are continually found ; or in law, how the 
 summum jus, where unredressed by equity, be 
 comes the summa injuria, as in the case of Shy- 
 lock s pound of flesh, which was indeed no more 
 than was in the bond. Or observe on a greater 
 scale, as lately in France, how a wild and lawless 
 democracy may be transformed by the base trick 
 of a conjuror into an atrocious military tyranny. f 
 
 * Chi dinanzi mi pinge. di dietro mi tinge. . 
 
 | How and wliy it is that extremes here meet, and what are the 
 
102 POETRY, ETC., OF PKOVKRBS. 
 
 Or read thoughtfully the history of the church and 
 of the sects, and you will not fail to note what 
 things apparently the most remote are yet in the 
 most fearful proximity with one another : how often, 
 for example, a false ascetisrn lias issued in frantic 
 outbreaks of fleshly lusts, and those who avowed 
 themselves at one time ambitious to live "lives 
 above men, have ended in living lives below beasts. 
 Again, take note of England at the ^Restoration 
 exchanging all in a moment the sour strictness of 
 the puritans for a license and debauchery unknown 
 to it before. Or, once more, consider the exactly 
 similar position in respect of scripture, taken up by 
 the Romanists on the one side, the quakers and 
 familists on the other. Seeming, and in much 
 being, so remote from one another, they yet have 
 this fundamental in common, that scripture, insuffi 
 cient in itself, needs a supplement from without, 
 those finding it in a pope, and these in what they 
 call the "inward light." With these examples be 
 fore you, not to speak of the many others which 
 might be adduced,-" you will own, I think, that this 
 proverb, Extremes meet or its parallel, Too far east 
 is west reaches very far into the heart of things : 
 and with this, for the present, I must conclude. 
 
 inner affinities between a democracy and a tyranny, Plato has -won 
 derfully traced (Rep. li. p. 217). 
 
 * " Extremes meet. Truths, of all others the most awful and inter 
 est mar, are too often considered as so true, that they lose all the power 
 <.f truths, and lie, bedridden in the dormitory of the soul, side by side 
 \\ith. the most despised and exploded errors." Coleridge, Aids, <<. 
 
THE MORALITY PROVERBS.. 103 
 
 LECTUKE V. 
 
 THE MORALITY OF PROVERBS. 
 
 THE morality of proverbs is a subject which I 
 have not been able to leave wholly untouched until 
 now, for of necessity it has offered itself to us con 
 tinually, in one shape or another ; yet hitherto I 
 have not regularly dealt with or considered it. To 
 it I propose to devote the present lecture. But 
 how, it may be asked at the outset, can any general 
 verdict be pronounced about them ? In a family 
 like theirs, spread so widely over the face of the 
 earth, are there not to be found worthy members 
 and unworthy, proverbs noble and base, holy and 
 profane, heavenly and earthly; yea, heavenly, 
 earthly, and devilish? What common judgment 
 of phrase or censure can be pronounced on all 
 these ? Evidently none. The only question, there 
 fore, for our consideration must be, whether there 
 exists any such large and unquestionable prepon 
 derance either of the better sort or of the worse, as 
 shall give us a right to pronounce a judgment on 
 the whole in their favor or against them, to affirm 
 of them that their prevailing influence and weight 
 
104 THE MORALITY OF PROVERBS. 
 
 are thrown into the balance of the good or of the 
 evil. 
 
 And here I am persuaded that no one can have 
 devoted any serious attention to this aspect of the 
 subject, but will own (and seeing how greatly pop 
 ular morals are affected by popular proverbs, will 
 own with thankfulness), that, if not without serious 
 exceptions, yet still in the main they range them 
 selves under the banners of the right and of the 
 truth ; he will allow that of so many as move in 
 an ethical sphere at all, very far more are children 
 of light and the day than of darkness and night. 
 Indeed, the comparative paucity of unworthy prov 
 erbs is a very noticeable fact, arid one to the causes 
 of which I shall have presently to recur. 
 
 At the same time, when I affirm this, I find it 
 necessary to make certain explanations, to draw 
 certain distinctions. In the first place, I would not 
 in so saying, in the least deny that an ample num 
 ber of coarse proverbs are extant: it needs but to 
 turn over a page or two of Ray s Collection of 
 English Proverbs, or indeed of any collection in 
 any tongue, which has not been weeded carefully, 
 to convince oneself of the fact; nor yet would I 
 deny,that of these many may, more or less, live on 
 the lips of men. Having their birth, for the most 
 part, in a period of a nation s literature and life 
 when men are much more plain-spoken, and have 
 far fewer reticences than is afterward the case, it 
 
PROVERBS SEEMINGLY IMMORAL. 105 
 
 is nothing strange that some of them, employing 
 words forbidden now, but not forbidden then, should 
 sound coarse and indelicate enough in our ears : 
 while indeed there are others, whose offence and 
 grossness these considerations, while they may mit 
 igate, are quite insufficient to excuse. But at the 
 same time, gross words and images (I speak not of 
 wanton ones), bad as they may be, are altogether 
 different from immoral maxims and rules of life. 
 And it is these immoral maxims, unrighteous, self 
 ish, or otherwise unworthy rules, of which I would 
 affirm the number to be, if not absolutely, yet rela 
 tively small. 
 
 And then further, in estimating the morality of 
 proverbs, this also will claim in justice not to be 
 forgotten. In the same manner as coarse proverbs 
 are not necessarily immoral, so the application 
 which is made of a proverb by us may very often 
 be hardhearted and selfish, while yet the proverb 
 itself is very far from so being. This selfishness 
 and hardness lay not in it of primary intention, but 
 only by our abuse ; and in the cases of several, 
 these two things, the proverb itself, and the ordi 
 nary employment of it, will demand to be kept care 
 fully apart from one another. For instance : lie 
 has made his bed, and now he must lie on it / As 
 he has Irciced, so he must drink ; As he has sown, 
 so must he reap ;* if these are* employed to justify 
 
 * They have for their Latin equivalents such as these: Colo quod 
 
106 THE MORALITY OF PROVERBS. 
 
 us in refusing to save others, so far as we may, from 
 the consequences of their own folly, or imprudence, 
 or even guilt, why then one can only say that they 
 are very ill employed: and there are few of us 
 with whom it would not have gone hardly, had all 
 those about us acted in the spirit of these proverhs 
 so misinterpreted; had they refused to mitigate for 
 us, so far as they could, the consequences of our 
 errors. But if the words are taken in their true 
 sense, as homely announcements of that law of 
 divine retaliations in the world, according to which 
 men shall eat of the fruit of their own doings, and 
 be tilled with their own ways, who shall gainsay 
 them ? What affirm they more than every page of 
 Scripture, every turn of human life, is affirming too, 
 namely, that the everlasting order of God s uni 
 verse can not be violated with impunity, that there 
 is a continual returning upon men of what they 
 have done, and that in their history we may read 
 their judgment. 
 
 Charity begins at home, is the most obvious and 
 familiar of these proverbs, selfishly abused. It 
 may be, no doubt it often is, made the plea for a 
 selfish withholding of assistance from all but a few, 
 whom men may include in their " at home," while 
 sometimes the proverb receives a narrower inter 
 pretation still, and self and self only, is accounted 
 
 nptasti, ipsi tiht nemlum est; Ut sementem feceris, ita metes; Qui 
 vinum bibit, fcecem bibat . 
 
SELFISH ABUSE OP PJIOVE11BS. 107 
 
 to be " at home." And yet, in truth, what were 
 that charity worth, which did not begin at home, 
 which did not preserve the divine order and pro 
 portion and degree 2 Not for nothing have we 
 been grouped in families, neighborhoods, and na 
 tions ; and lie who will not recognise the divinely 
 appointed nearnesses to himself of some over others, 
 who thinks to be a cosmopolite without being a 
 patriot, a philanthropist without owning a distin 
 guishing love for them that are peculiarly "his 
 own," who would thus have a circumference with 
 out a centre, deceives his own heart, and affirming 
 all men to be equally dear to him, is indeed affirm 
 ing them to be equally indifferent. Home, the 
 family, this is as the hearth at which the affections 
 which are afterward to go forth and warm in a 
 larger circle, are themselves to be kept lively and 
 warm ; and the charity which did not exercise 
 itself in outcomings of kindness and love in the 
 narrower, would be little likely to seek a wider 
 range for itself. Wherever else it may end, and 
 the larger the sphere which it makes for itself the 
 better, it must yet begin at home.* 
 
 There are, again, proverbs which, from another 
 point of view, might seem of an ignoble cast, and 
 
 * In respect of other proverbs, such as the following, Tunica pallio 
 propior; Frons occipitio prior; I have greater doubt. The misuse 
 lies nearer; the selfishness may verv probably be in the proverb 
 itself, and not in our application of it; though even these seem not 
 incapable of a fair interpretation. 
 
108 THE MORALITY OF PKOVEKBS. 
 
 as calculated to lower the tone of morality among 
 those that received them ; proposing as they do 
 secondary, and therefore unworthy, motives to ac 
 tions, which ought to be performed out of the high 
 est. I mean such as this : Honesty is the fast pol 
 icy j wherein honesty is commended, not because 
 it is right, but because it is most prudent and 
 politic, and has the promise of this present world. 
 Now doubtless there are proverbs not a few which, 
 like this, move in the region of what has been well 
 called " prudential morality ;" and did we accept 
 them as containing the whole circle of motives to 
 honesty or other right conduct, nothing could be 
 worse, or more fitted to lower the moral standard 
 of our lives. He who resolves to be honest because, 
 and only because, it is the best policy , will be little 
 likely long to continue honest at all. But the prov 
 erb does not pretend to usurp the place of an 
 ethical rule ; it does not presume to cast down the 
 higher law which should determine to honesty and 
 uprightness, that it may put itself in its place ; it 
 only declares that honesty, let alone that it is the 
 right thing, is also, even for this present world, the 
 wisest. Nor dare we, let me further add, despise 
 prudential morality, such as is embodied in sayings 
 like this. The motives which it suggests are helps 
 to a weak find tempted virtue, may prove great 
 assistances to it in some passing moment of a vio 
 lent temptation, however little they can be regarded 
 
PKOVKRBS ABOUT SIXFISHNESS. 109 
 
 as able to make men for a continuance even out 
 wardly upright and just. 
 
 And once more, proverbs are not to be accounted 
 selfish, which announce selfishness ; unless they do 
 it either avowedly recommending it as a rule and 
 maxim of life, or, if not so, yet with an evident 
 complacency and satisfaction in the announcement 
 which they make, and in this more covert and per 
 haps still more mischievous way, taking part with 
 the evil which they proclaim. There are a great 
 many proverbs, which a lover of his race would be 
 very thankful if there had been nothing in the 
 world to justify or to provoke; for the convictions 
 they embody, the experiences on which they rest 
 must be regarded as very far from complimentary 
 to human nature ; but seeing that there is, it would 
 be idle to wish them away, to wish that this evil 
 had not found its utterance. Nay, it is much bet 
 ter that it should so have done ; for thus taking 
 form and shape, and being brought directly un 
 der notice, it may be better watched against and 
 avoided. 
 
 Such proverbs, not selfish, but rather detecting 
 selfishness and laying it bare, are the following; 
 this Russian, on the only too slight degree in which 
 we are touched with other men s troubles : The 
 burden is light on the shoulders of another j with 
 which the French may be compared : One has 
 always enough strength to bear the misfortunes of 
 
110 THE MORALITY OF PROVERBS. 
 
 one s friends* Such is this Italian : Every one 
 draws the water to his own mill ;\ or as it appears 
 in its Eastern shape, which brings up the desert- 
 bivouac before one s eyes : Every one rakes the 
 embers to his own cake ; such this Latin, on the 
 comparative wastefulness wherewith that which -is 
 another s is too often used : Men cut broad thongs 
 from other men s leather j\ with many more of the 
 same character, which it would be only too easy to 
 bring together. 
 
 With all this, I would not of course in the least 
 deny that immoral proverbs, and only too many of 
 them, exist. For if they are, as we have recognised 
 them to be, the genuine transcript of what is stir 
 ring in the hearts, and uttering itself by the lips, of 
 men, then, since there is cowardice, untruth, selfish 
 ness, unholiness, profaneness, there, how should 
 they be wanting here ? The world is not so con 
 summate a hypocrite as the entire absence of all 
 such would imply. There will be proverbs merely 
 selfish, as our own; Every one for himself , and 
 God for us all / or as this Dutch : Selfs the man * 
 or more shamelessly cynical still, as the French; 
 
 * On a toujours assez de force pour supporter le malheur de ses 
 amis. I confess this sounds to me rather like an imitation of Rocho- 
 foucault than a genuine proverb. 
 
 j- Ogimn tira 1 acqua al suo molino. 
 
 \ Ex alieno tergore lata secantur lora. 
 
 8 Zelf is de Man. 
 
IMMORAL FRO VERBS. Ill 
 
 Better a grape for me, than two figs for thee y* or 
 such as proclaim a doubt and disbelief in the exist 
 ence of any high moral integrity anywhere, as 
 JFkery man has his price or assume that poor 
 men can scarcely be honest, as It is hard for an 
 ei^ipty sack to stand straight ; or take it for granted 
 that every man would cheat every other if he could, 
 as the French : Count after your father yf or, if 
 they do not actually " speak good of the covetous," 
 yet assume it possible that any blessing can wait 
 o i that which a wicked covetousness has heaped 
 together, as the Spanish : Blessed is the son whose 
 father went to the Devil ; or find cloaks and apol 
 ogies for sin, as the German: Once is never /: or 
 svch as would imply that the evil of a sin lay not 
 in its sinfulness, but in the outward disgrace an- 
 rexed to it, as the Italian : A. sin concealed is half 
 forgiven.^ Or again there will be proverbs das 
 tardly and base, as the Spanish maxim of caution, 
 \A hich advises to Draw the snake from its hole by 
 another marts hand ; to put, that is, another, and 
 it may be for your own profit, to the peril from 
 which you shrink yourself; or more dastardly still, 
 
 * J aime mieux un raisin pour moi que deux figues pour toi. 
 
 \ Comptez apres votre pere. Compare the Spanish : Entre dos 
 aviigos un notario y dos testigos. 
 
 t Einmal, keinmnl. This proverb was turned to such bad uses, 
 that a German divine thought it necessary to write a treatise against 
 it. There exist indeed several old works in German with such 
 titles as the following, Ungodly Proverbs and their Refutation. 
 
 Peccato celato, mezzo perdonato. 
 
112 THE MORALITY OF PRO VERBS. 
 
 " scoundrel maxims," an old English poet has called 
 them ; as for instance, that one which is acted on 
 only too often: One must howl with the wolves;* 
 in other words, when a general cry is raised against 
 any, it is safest to join in it, lest one be supposed to 
 sympathize with its object ; he must howl with the 
 wolves, who would not be hunted by them. In the 
 whole circle of proverbs I know no baser, nor more 
 dastardly than this. And yet who will say that he 
 has never traced in himself the cowardly temptation 
 to obey it? And there will be, of which 1 shall 
 spare you any examples, proverbs wanton and im 
 pure, and not merely proverbs thus earthly and 
 sensual, but devilish ; such as some of those Italian 
 on revenge which I quoted in my third lecture. 
 
 But for all this these immoral proverbs, rank 
 weeds among the wholesome corn, are compara 
 tively rare. In the minority with all people, they 
 are immeasurably in the minority with most. The 
 fact is not a little worthy of our note. Surely there 
 lies in it a solemn testimony, that however men 
 may and do in their conduct continually violate 
 the rule of right, yet these violations are ever felt 
 to be such, are inwardly confessed not to be the 
 law of man s life, but the transgressions of the law ; 
 and thus, stricken as with a secret shame, and 
 paying an unconscious homage to the majesty of 
 
 * Badly turned into a rhyming pentameter: 
 
 Consonus esto lupis, cum quibus esse cupis. 
 
FRUGALITY INCULCATED. 113 
 
 goodness, they do not presume to raise themselves 
 into maxims, nor for all the frequency with which 
 they may he repeated pretend to claim recognition 
 as ahiding standards of action. 
 
 As the sphere in which the proverb moves is no 
 imaginary world, but that actual and often very 
 homely world which is round us and about us as 
 it does not float in the clouds, but sets its feet firm 
 ly on this common earth of ours from which itself 
 once grew, being occupied with present needs and 
 every-day cares -it is only natural that the proverbs 
 having reference to money should be numerous ; 
 and in the main it would be well if the practice of 
 the world rose to the height of its convictions as 
 expressed in these. Frugality is connected with 
 so many virtues at least, its contrary makes so 
 many impossible that the numerous proverbial 
 maxims inculcating this, than which none perhaps 
 are more frequent on the lips of men, must be re 
 garded as belonging to the better order ; especially 
 when taken with the check of others, which forbid 
 this frugality from degenerating into a sordid and 
 dishonorable parsimony ; such, I mean, as our own ; 
 The groat is ill saved which shames its master. 
 In how many the conviction speaks out that the 
 hastily -gotten will hardly be the honestly- gotten, 
 that "lie who makes haste to be rich shall not be 
 innocent," as when the Spaniards say : lie who will 
 
THE MORALITY OF PROVERBS. 
 
 l)e rich in a year, at the half-year they hang him }* 
 in how many others, the confidence that the ill- 
 won will also be the ill-spent,f that he who shuts 
 up unlawful gain in his storehouses, is shutting up 
 a fire that will one day destroy them. Yery solemn 
 and weighty in this sense is the German prov 
 erb : The unrighteous penny corrupts the righteous 
 pound ;% and the Spanish, too, is striking: That 
 which is another s always yearns for its lord ; it 
 yearns, that is to be gone and get to its true owner. 
 In how many the conviction is expressed that this 
 mammon, which more than anything else men are 
 tempted to think God does not concern himself 
 about, is yet given and taken away by him ac 
 cording to the laws of his righteousness ; given 
 sometimes to his enemies and for their greater pun 
 ishment, that under its fatal influence they may 
 grow worse and worse, for The more the carle 
 riches, lie wretches ; but oftener withdrawn, be 
 cause no due acknowledgment of him was made in 
 its use ; as when the German proverb declares : 
 Charity gives itself rich; covetousness hoards 
 itself poor ;\ and the Danish: Give alms, that thy 
 
 * Quien en un ano quiere ser rico, al medio le ahorcan. 
 
 f Male parta male dilabuntur. Wie gewonnen, so zerronnen. 
 
 \ Ungerechter Pfennig verzehrt gerechten Thaler. 
 
 Lo ageno siempre pia por su dueno. 
 
 j| Der Geiz sammlet sich arm, die Milde giebt sich reich. In the 
 sense of the latter half of this proverb, we say, Drawn wells are 
 seldom dry ; though this word is capable of very far wider appli 
 cation. 
 
PROVEEBS ABOUT KICIIES. 115 
 
 children may not ash them and the rabbis, with 
 a yet deeper significance : Alms are the salt of 
 riches ; the true antiseptic, which as such shall 
 prevent them from themselves corrupting, and from 
 corrupting those that have them ; which shall hin 
 der them from developing a germ of corruption, 
 such as shall in the end involve in one destruction 
 them and their owners.* At the same time, as it 
 is the veiy character of proverbs to look at mat 
 ters all round, there are others to remind that even 
 this very giving itself shall be with forethought and 
 discretion ; thus there is a Danish which says, So 
 give to-day, that tliou shalt 1)6 able to give to 
 morrow ; and another : 80 give to one, that thou 
 shalt have to give to another.^ 
 
 Let me further invite you to observe and to ad- 
 
 * There is one remarkable Latin proverb on the moral cowardli 
 ness which it is the character of riches to generate, saying more 
 briefly the same which Wordsworth said when he proclaimed 
 
 "That riches are akin 
 
 To fear, to change, to cowardice, and death;" 
 
 it is this: Timidus Plutus; and has sometimes suggested to me the 
 question whether he might not have had it in his mind when he com 
 posed his great sonnet in prospect of the invasion: 
 
 "These times touch moneyed worldlings with dismay ;" 
 not that his genius needed any such solicitation from without; for 
 the poem is only the natural outgrowth of that spirit and temper in 
 which the whole series of noble and ennobling poems, the Sonnets 
 to Libert </, is composed, and in perfect harmony with the rest; yet 
 is it, notwithstanding, in a very wonderful way shut up in the two 
 words of the ancient proverb. 
 
 j- Civ saa i Dng, at du og kandst give i morgen. Giv een at du 
 kcind give on anden. 
 
116 THE MORALITY OF PROVERBS. 
 
 mire the prevailing tone of manliness which per 
 vades the great body of the proverbs of all nations : 
 let me urge you to take note how very few there 
 are which would fain persuade you that " luck is 
 all," or that your fortunes are in any other hands, 
 under God, than your own. There are some, but 
 they are exceptions, to which the gambler, the 
 idler, the so-called " waiter upon Providence," can 
 appeal. For the most part, however, they coura 
 geously accept the law of labor, Nop&ins, no gains; 
 No sweat, no sweet ; wo mill, no meal* as the ap 
 pointed law and condition of man s life. Where 
 wilt thou go, ox, that thou wilt not have toplough?^ 
 is the Catalan remonstrance, addressed to one who 
 imagines by any outward change of circumstances 
 to evade the inevitable task and toil of existence. 
 And this is Turkish : It is not with saying, Honey, 
 honey, that sweetness will come into the mouth, 
 and to many languages another with its striking 
 image, Sloth, the key of poverty, $ belongs; while, 
 011 the other hand, there are in almost all tongues 
 such proverbs as the following: God helps them 
 that help themselves / or, as it appears with a slight 
 
 * This is the English form of that worthy old classical proverb: 
 fystyuv jjv\ov, (i\<i>tru <j>tvyti, or in Latin: Qui vitat molam, vitat 
 farinain. 
 
 j- Ahont aniras, bou, que no llaures ? I prefer this form of it to 
 the Spanish: Adonde yni el buey, que no are? 
 
 \ Pereza, Have de pobrezn. 
 
 Dii facieutes adjuvant. 
 
PKOVREBS ON SELF -RELIANCE. . 117 
 
 variation*in the Basque, God is a good worker, ~but 
 he loves to oe helped. And these proverbs, let me 
 observe by the way, were not strange, in their im 
 port at least, to the founder of that religion which 
 is usually supposed to inculcate a blind and indo 
 lent fatalism however some who call themselves 
 by his name may have forgotten the lesson which, 
 they convey. Certainly they were not strange to 
 Mahomet himself, if the following excellently-spo 
 ken word has been rightly ascribed to him. One 
 evening, we are told, after a weary march through 
 the desert, he was camping with his followers, and 
 overheard one of them saying, " I will loose my 
 camel and commit it to God ;" on which Mahomet 
 took him up : " Friend, tie thy camel, and commit 
 it to God ;"* do, that is, whatever is thine to do, 
 and then leave the issue in higher hands ; but till 
 tliou hast done this, till thou hast thus helped thy 
 self, thou hast no right to look to Heaven to help 
 thee. 
 
 How excellently this unites genuine modesty and 
 manly self-assertion : Bit in your own place, and 
 no man can malte you rise / and how good is this 
 Spanish, on the real dignity which there often is in 
 doing things for ourselves, rather than in standing 
 by and suffering others to do them for us : Who 
 has a mouth, let him, not say to another, Bloio.^ 
 
 * According to the Spanish proverb : Quien bien ata, bien desftta. 
 f Quien tiene boca, no diga a otro, Sopla. 
 
118 THE MORALITY OF PROVERBS. 
 
 And as a part of this, which I have called the 
 manliness of proverbs, let me especially note the 
 noble utterances which so many contain, summon 
 ing to a brave encountering of adverse fortune, to 
 perseverance under disappointment and defeat, and 
 a long-continued inclemency of fate. Where one 
 door shuts, another opens;* this belongs to too 
 many nations to allow of our ascribing it especially 
 to any one. And this Latin, The sun of all days 
 has not yet gone down,\ however, in its primary 
 application, intended for those who are at the 
 top of Fortune s wheel, to warn them that they 
 be not high-minded for there is yet time for 
 many a revolution in that wheel is equally good 
 for those at the bottom, and as it contains warn 
 ing for those, so strength and encouragement for 
 these ; for, as the Italians say, The world is his 
 who has patience.^. And then, to pass over some 
 of our own, so familiar that they need not be ad 
 duced, how manful a lesson is contained in this 
 Persian proverb: A stone that is Jit for the wall is 
 not left in the way. It is a saying made for them 
 who appear for a while to be overlooked, neglected, 
 passed by; who perceive in themselves capacities, 
 which as yet no one else has recognised or cared to 
 turn to account. Only befit for the wall ; square, 
 
 * Donde una puerta se cierra, otra se abre. 
 { Nondum omnium dierum sol occidit. 
 \ II mondo e, di chi ha pazienza. 
 
MANLINESS OF PROVERBS. 119 
 
 polish, prepare thyself for it ; do not limit thyself 
 to the bare acquisition of such knowledge ^:. is ab 
 solutely necessary for thy present position; but 
 rather learn languages, acquire useful information, 
 stretch thyself out on this side and on that, cherish 
 ing and making much of whatever aptitudes them 
 findest in thyself; and it is certain thy turn will 
 come. Thou wilt not be left in the way ; sooner or 
 later the builders will be glad of thee ; the wall will 
 need thee to fill up a place in it, quite as much as 
 tliou needest a place to occupy in the wall. For 
 the amount of real capacity in this world is so small, 
 that places want persons to fill them quite as really 
 as persons want to fill places; although it must be 
 allowed, they are not always as much aware of 
 their want. 
 
 And this proverb, Italian and Spanish, If I have 
 lost the ring, yet the fingers are still here* is 
 another of these brave utterances of which I have 
 been speaking. In it is asserted the comparative 
 indifference of that loss which reaches but to things 
 external to us, so long as we ourselves remain, and 
 are true to ourselves. The fingers are far more 
 than the ring : if indeed those had gone, then the 
 man would have been maimed ; but another ring 
 may come for that which has disappeared, or even 
 with none the fingers will be fingers still. And as 
 
 * Se ben ho perso Tanello, ho pur anche le ditta ; Si se perdieron 
 los anillos, aqui quedaron los dedillos. 
 
120 THE MORALITY OF PROVERBS. 
 
 at once a contrast and complement to tins, take 
 another, current among the free blacks of Hayti, 
 and expressing well the little profit which, there will 
 be to a man in pieces of mere good luck, which are 
 no true outgrowths of anything which is in him ; 
 the manner in which, having no root in himself out 
 of which they grew, they will, as they came to him 
 by hazard, go from him by the same : The knife 
 which tliou hast found in the highway, thou wilt 
 lose in the highway.* 
 
 But these numerous proverbs, urging self-reli 
 ance, bidding us first to aid ourselves, if we would 
 have Heaven to aid us, must not be dismissed with 
 out a word or two at parting. Prizing them, as we 
 well may, and the lessons which they contain, at 
 the highest, yet it will be profitable for us, at the 
 same time, always to remember that to such there 
 lies very near such a mischievous perversion as 
 this : " Aid thyself, and thou wilt need no other 
 aid ;" -even as they have been sometimes, no doubt, 
 understood in this sense. As, then, the pendant 
 and counter-weight to them all, not as unsaying 
 what they have said, but as fulfilling the other 
 hemisphere in the complete orb of truth, let me 
 remind you of such also as the following, often 
 quoted or alluded to by Greek and Latin authors : 
 
 * In their bastard French it runs thus: Gambette ous trouv6 nen 
 gan chimin, nen gan chirnin ous Y.I pode li. It may have been 
 originally French, at any rate the French have a proverb very much 
 to the same effect: Ce qui vient par la flute, e en va par le tambour. 
 
PEOVEEBS FOR YOUNG MEN. 121 
 
 jffie net of the sleeping (fisherman) takes;* a 
 proverb the more interesting, that we should have 
 in the words of the Psalmist (Ps. cxxvii. 2), were 
 they accurately translated, a beautiful and perfect 
 parallel : " He giveth his beloved" (not " sleep," as 
 in our version, but) "in their sleep;" his gifts 
 gliding into their bosoms, they knowing not how, 
 and as little expecting as having labored for them. 
 Of how many of the best gifts of every man s life 
 will he not thankfully acknowledge this to have 
 been true; or, if he refuse, and will acknowledge 
 no eudcemonia, no "favorable providence," in his 
 prosperities, but will see them all as of work, how 
 little he deserves, how little likely he is, to retain 
 them to the end. Let us hold fast, then, this prov 
 erb, as the most needful complement of those. 
 
 I feel that I should be wanting to hearers such 
 as those who are assembled here, that I should fail 
 in that purpose which has been, more or less, pres 
 ent to me even in dealing with the lighter portions 
 of my subject, if I did not earnestly remind you of 
 the many of these sayings that there are, which, 
 while they have their lesson for all, yet seem more 
 directly addressed to those standing, as not a few 
 
 * Ei Joirt x-uproj atpti. Dormienti rete trahit. The reader with a 
 Plutarch s Lives within his reach, may turn to the very instructive 
 little history told in connection with this proverb, of Timotheus the 
 Athenian commander; a history which only requires to be trans 
 lated into Christian language to contain a deep moral for all. 
 (Sulla, c. 6.) 
 
 6 
 
122 THE MORALITY OF PROVERBS. 
 
 of us here, at the threshold of the more serious 
 and earnest portion of their lives. Lecturing to a 
 Young Metis Society, I shall not unfitly press these 
 upon your notice. Take this Italian one, for in 
 stance : When you grind your corn, give not the 
 flour to the devil, and the ~bran to God; in the dis 
 tribution, that is, of your lives, apportion not your 
 best years, your strength, and your vigor, to the 
 service of sin and of the world, and only the refuse 
 and rejected to your Maker the wine to others, 
 and the lees only to him. Not so ; for there is 
 another ancient proverb,* which we have made 
 very well our own, and which in English runs thus, 
 It is too late to spare when all is spent. The words 
 have obviously a primary application to the goods 
 of this present life ; it is ill saving here, when noth 
 ing, or next to nothing, is left to save. But they 
 are applied well by a heathen moralist (and the 
 application lies very near) to those who begin to 
 husband precious time, and to live for life s true 
 ends, when life is nearly gone, is now at its dregs ; 
 for, as he well urges, it is not the least only which 
 remains at the bottom, but the worst.f On the 
 other hand, The morning hour has gold in its 
 mouth ;$ and this, true in respect of each of our 
 
 * Sera in imo parsimonia. 
 
 f Seneca (Ep. i.): Non enim tantum minimum in imo, sed pessi- 
 mum remanet 
 
 \ Morgenstund hat Gold im Mund. 
 
ECONOMY OF TIME. 123 
 
 days, in which the earlier hours given to toil will 
 yield larger and more genial returns than the later, 
 is true in a yet higher sense, of that great life-day, 
 whereof all the lesser days of our life make up the 
 moments is true in respect of moral no less than 
 mental acquisition. The evening hours have often 
 only silver in their mouths at the best. Nor is this 
 Arabic proverb, as it appears to me, other than a 
 very solemn one, being far deeper than at first sight 
 it might seem : Every day in thy life is a leaf in 
 thy history a leaf which shall once be turned back 
 to again, that it may be seen what was written there ; 
 and that whatever was written may be read out in 
 the hearing of all. 
 
 And among the proverbs having to do with a 
 prudent ordering of our lives from the very first, 
 this Spanish seems well worthy to be adduced : 
 That wliicli the fool does in the end, the wise man 
 does at the beginning ;* the wise with a good grace 
 what the fool with an ill ; the one to much profit 
 what the other to little or to none. A word worth 
 laying to heart; for, indeed, that purchase of the 
 Sibylline books by the Roman king, what a signifi 
 cant symbol it is of that which at one time or 
 another, or, it may be, at many times, is finding 
 place in almost every man s life ; the same thing to 
 be done in the end, the same price to be paid at the 
 last, with only the difference, that much of the ad- 
 
 * Lo que haee el loco a la postre, hace sabio al princi pio. 
 
THE MORALITY OF PROVERBS. 
 
 vantage as well as grace of an earlier compliance 
 has passed away. The nine precious volumes have 
 shrunk to six, and these dwindled to three, while 
 yet the like price is demanded for the few as for the 
 many ; for the remnant now as would once have 
 made all our own. 
 
 I have already, in a former lecture, adduced a 
 proverb which warns against a bad book as the 
 worst of all robbers. In respect, too, of books 
 which are not bad nay, of which the main staple 
 is good, but in which there is yet an admixture of 
 evil, as is the case with so many that have come 
 down to us from that old world not as yet partaker 
 of Christ there is a proverb, which may very 
 profitably accompany us in our study of all these : 
 Where the liee xucks honey, the spider sucks poison. 
 Very profitably may this word be kept in mind by 
 such as at any time are making themselves familiar 
 with the classical literature of antiquity, the great 
 writers of heathen Greece and Koine. ITow much 
 of noble, how much of elevating, what love of 
 country, what zeal for wisdom, may be drawn from 
 them : yea, even to us Christians, what intellectual, 
 what moral gains will they yield ! Let the student 
 be as the bee looking for honey, and from the fields 
 and gardens of classical literature he may store it 
 abundantly in his hive. And yet from this same 
 body of literature what poison is it possible to 
 draw ; what loss, through familiarity with evil, of 
 
ILL-DOERS ARE ILL-DEEMERS. 125 
 
 all vigorous abhorrence of it, till even the foulest 
 enormities shall come to be regarded with a specu 
 lative curiosity rather than with an earnest hatred ! 
 yea, what lasting defilement of the imagination and 
 the heart, may be contracted hence, till nothing 
 shall be pure, the very mind and conscience being 
 defiled. Let there come one whose sympathies and 
 affinities are with the poison, and not with the 
 honey ; and in these fields it will not be impossible 
 for him to find deadly flowers and weeds from 
 which he may suck poison enough. 
 
 And here is one with an insight at once subtle 
 and profound into the heart of man, Ill-doers are 
 ill-deemers ; and instead of any commentary on 
 this of my own, let me quote some words which 
 were not intended to be a commentary upon it at 
 all, and which furnish, notwithstanding, a better 
 than any which I could hope to give. They are 
 words of a great English divine of the seventeenth 
 century, who is accounting for the offence which 
 the Pharisee took at the Lord s acceptance of the 
 nffectionate homage and costly offering of the 
 woman that was a sinner : " Which familiar and 
 affectionate officiousness, and sumptuous cost, to 
 gether with that sinister fame that woman was 
 noted with, could not but give much scandal to the 
 Pharisees there present. For that dispensation of 
 the law under which they lived making nothing 
 perfect, but only curbing the outward actions of 
 
126 THE MORALITY OF PROVERBS. 
 
 men ; it might very well be that they, being con 
 scious to themselves of no better motions within 
 than of either bitterness or lust, how fair soever 
 they carried without, could not deem Christ s ac 
 ceptance of so familiar and affectionate a service 
 from a woman of that fame to proceed from any 
 thing better than some loose and vain principle 
 
 for by how much every one is himself obnoxious to 
 temptation, by so much more suspicious he is that 
 others transgress, when there is anything that* may 
 tempt out the corruptions of a man."* 
 
 With a few remarks on one proverb more, I will 
 bring this lecture to an end. It is this : Better a 
 diamond with a flaw, than a pebble without one. 
 Here, to my mind, is the assertion of a great Chris 
 tian truth, and of one which reaches deep down 
 to the very foundations of Christian morality, the 
 more valuable as coming to us from a people the 
 Chinese beyond the range and reach of the in 
 fluences of direct revelation. We may not be all 
 aware of the many and malignant assaults which 
 were made on the Christian faith, and on the moral 
 ity of the Bible, through the character of David, by 
 the blind and self-righteous deists of a century or 
 more ago. Taking the scripture testimony about 
 
 * Henry More, On Godliness, b. 8. How remarkable a confirma 
 tion of the fact asserted in that proverb and in this passage, lies in 
 the uses of the Greek word KflKor/0a; having, for its -first meaning, 
 an evil disposition in a man s self, it has for its second an interpreting 
 on his part for the worst of all the actions of other men. 
 
CHARACTER OF DAVID. 127 
 
 him, that he was the man after God s heart, and 
 putting beside this the record of those great sins 
 which he committed, they sought to set these great 
 yet still isolated offences in the most hateful light ; 
 and thus to bring at once him, and those who praised 
 him, to a common shame. But all this while, with 
 the question of the man, what he was with this, 
 with the moral sum total of his life, to which alone 
 the scripture testimony bore witness, and to which 
 alone it was pledged they concerned themselves 
 not at all : which yet was a far more important 
 question than what any of his single acts may have 
 been, and that which, in the estimate of his charac 
 ter, was really at issue. To this question we an 
 swer, a diamond, which, if a diamond with a flaw, 
 as are all but the one " whole and perfect chryso 
 lite," would yet outvalue a mountain of pebbles 
 without one, such as they were ; even assuming the 
 pebbles to le without, and not merely to seem so, 
 because their flaw was an all-pervading one, and 
 only not so quickly detected, inasmuch as the con 
 trast was wanting of any clearer material which 
 should at once reveal its presence. 
 
128 THE THEOLOGY OF PKOVERBS. 
 
 LECTUKE VI. 
 
 THE THEOLOGY OF PROVERBS. 
 
 I SOUGHT, as best I could, in my last lecture, to 
 enable you to estimate the ethical worth of prov 
 erbs. Their theology alone remains ; the aspects, 
 that is, under which they contemplate, not now 
 any more man s relations with his fellow-man, but 
 those on which in the end all other must depend, 
 his relations with God. Between the subject-mat 
 ter, indeed, of that lecture and of this, I have found 
 it nearly impossible to draw any accurate line of 
 distinction. Much which was there might nearly 
 as fitly have been here ; some which I have re 
 served for this might already have found its place 
 there. It is this, however, which I propose more 
 directly to consider, namely, what proverbs have to 
 say concerning the moral government of the world, 
 and, more important still, concerning its Governor? 
 How does all this present itself to the popular mind 
 and conscience, as attested by these ? What, in 
 short, is their theology? for such, good or bad, it 
 is evident that abundantly they have. 
 
 Here, as everywhere else, their testimony is a 
 
THE GLORY OF PROVERBS. 129 
 
 mingled one. The darkness, the error, the con 
 fusion of man s heart, out of which he oftentimes 
 sees distortedly, and sometimes sees not at all, have 
 all embodied themselves in his word. Yet still, as 
 it is the very nature of the false, in its separate 
 manifestations, to resolve into nothingness, though 
 only to be succeeded by new births in a like kind, 
 while the true abides and continues, it has thus 
 come to pass that we have generally in these utter 
 ances on which the stamp of permanence has been 
 set, the nobler voices, the truer faith of humanity, 
 in respect of its own destinies and of him by whom 
 those destinies are ordered. 
 
 I would not hesitate to say that the great glory 
 of proverbs in this their highest aspect, and that 
 which makes many of them so full of blessing to 
 those who cordially accept them, is the conviction 
 of which they are full, that, despite all appearances 
 to the contrary, this world is God s world, and not 
 the world of the devil or of those wicked men who 
 may be prospering for their hour ; their faith that 
 in the long run it will approve itself to be such : 
 which being so, that it must be well in the end 
 with the doer of the right, the speaker of the truth ; 
 no blind " whirligig of time," but the hand of the 
 living God, in due time " bringing round its re 
 venges." It is impossible to estimate too highly 
 their bold and clear proclamation of this conviction ; 
 
 for it is, after all, the belief of this or the denial of 
 6* 
 
130 THE THEOLOGY OF PKOVERBS. 
 
 this, 011 which everything in the life of each one of 
 us turns ; on this depends whether we shall separate 
 ourselves from the world s falsehood and evil, arid 
 do vigorous battle against them ; or acquiesce in, 
 and be ourselves absorbed by, them. 
 
 Listen to proverbs such as these ; surely they are 
 penetrated with the assurance that one who, him 
 self being the truth, will make truth in small and 
 in great to triumph at the last, is ruling over all. 
 And first, hear a proverb of our own : A lie has no 
 legs j it is one true alike in its humblest application 
 and its highest ; be the lie the miserable petty false 
 hood which disturbs a family or a neighborhood for 
 a day ; or one of the larger frauds, the falsehoods 
 not in word only but in act, to which a longer date 
 and a far larger sphere is assigned, which for a time 
 seem to fill the world, and to carry everything in 
 triumph before them. Still the lie, in that it is a 
 lie, always carries within itself the germs of its 
 own dissolution. It is sure to destroy itself at 
 last. Its priests may prop it up from without, may 
 set it on its feet again after it has once fallen 
 before the presence of the truth, yet this all 
 will be labor in vain ; it will only be, like Dagon, 
 again to fall, and more shamefully and more irre 
 trievably than before.* On the other hand, the 
 
 * Perhaps the Spanish form of this proverb is still better: La 
 mentira tiene cortas las piernns; for the lie does go, though not far. 
 Compare the French: La ve>it6, comme 1 huile, vient audessus. 
 
TELL THE TBUTH. 131 
 
 vivacity of the truth, as contrasted with this short 
 lived character of the lie, is well expressed in a 
 Swiss proverb : It takes a good many shovelfuls 
 of earth to lury the truth. For, bury it as deep as 
 men may, it will have a resurrection notwithstand 
 ing. They may roll a great stone, and seal the 
 sepulchre in which it is laid, and set a watch upon 
 it, yet still, like its Lord, it comes forth again at its 
 appointed hour. It can not die, being of an im 
 mortal race ; for, as the Spanish proverb nobly 
 declares, The truth is daughter of God.* 
 
 Again, consider this proverb : Tell the truth^ and 
 shame the devil. It is one which will well repay a 
 few thoughtful moments bestowed on it, and the 
 more so, because, even while we instinctively feel 
 its truth, the deep moral basis on which it rests 
 may yet not reveal itself to us at once. Nay, the 
 saying may seem to contradict the actual experi 
 ence of things ; for how often telling the truth 
 confessing, that is, some great fault, taking home 
 to ourselves, it may be, some grievous sin would 
 appear anything rather than shaming the devil ; 
 shaming indeed ourselves, but rather bringing glory 
 to him, whose glory, such as it is, is in the sin and 
 shame of men. And yet the word is true, and deeply 
 true, notwithstanding. The element of lies is that 
 in which alone he who is " the father of them" lives 
 and thrives. So long then as a wrong-doer presents 
 
 * La verdad es hija de Dios. 
 
132 THE THEOLOGY OF PROVERBS. 
 
 to himself, or seeks to present to others, the actual 
 facts of his conduct different from what they really 
 are, conceals, palliates, denies them, so long, in 
 regard of that man, Satan s kingdom stands. But 
 so soon as the things concerning himself are seen 
 and owned by a man as they indeed exist in God s 
 sight, as they are when weighed in the balances of 
 the eternal righteousness ; when once a man has 
 brought himself to tell the truth to himself, and, 
 where need requires, to others also, then having 
 done, and in so far as he has done this, he has aban 
 doned the devil s standard, he belongs to the king 
 dom of the truth ; and as belonging to it he may 
 rebuke, and does rebuke and put to shame, all 
 makers and lovers of a lie, even to the very prince 
 of them all. " Give glory to God," was what Joshua 
 said to Achan, when he would lead him to confess 
 his guilt. This is but the other and fairer side of the 
 tapestry ; this is but shame the devil, on its more 
 blessed side. 
 
 Once more; the Latin proverb, The voice of 
 the people, the voice of God* is one which it is 
 well worth our while to understand. If it were 
 affirmed in this that every outcry of the multitude, 
 supposing only it be loud enough and wide enough, 
 ought to be accepted as the voice of God speaking 
 through them, no proposition more foolish or more 
 impious could well be imagined. But the voice of 
 
 * Vox populi, vox Dei. 
 
VOX POPULI, VOX DEI. 133 
 
 the people is something very different from this. 
 The proverb rests on the assumption that the foun 
 dations of man s heing are laid in the truth ; from 
 which it will follow, that no conviction whicli is 
 really a conviction of the universal humanity, but 
 reposes on a true ground : no faith, which is indeed 
 the faith of mankind, but has a reality correspon 
 ding to it ; for, as Jeremy Taylor has said, " it is 
 not a vain noise, when many nations join their 
 voices in the attestation or detestation of an action." 
 The task and difficulty, of course, must ever be to 
 discover what this faith and what these convictions 
 are ; and this can only be done by an induction 
 from a sufficient number of facts, and in sufficiently 
 different times, to enable us to feel confident that 
 we have indeed seized that which is the constant 
 quantity of truth in them all, and separated this 
 from the inconstant one of falsehood and error, 
 evermore offering itself in its room ; that we have 
 not taken some momentary cry, wrung out by in 
 terest, by passion, or by pain, for the voice of God ; 
 but claimed this august title only for that true voice 
 of humanity, which, unless everything be false, we 
 have a right to assume an echo of the voice of God. 
 Thus, to take an example, the natural horror 
 everywhere felt in regard of marriages contracted 
 between those very near in blood, has been always 
 and with right appealed to as a potent argument 
 against such marriages. The induction is so large, 
 
134 THE THEOLOGY OF PROVERBS. 
 
 that is, the nations who have agreed in entertaining 
 this horror are so many, oftentimes nations disa 
 greeing in almost everything besides the times 
 during which this instinctive revolt against such 
 unions has been felt, extend through such long 
 ages that the few exceptions, even where they are 
 of civilized nations, as of the Egyptians who mar 
 ried their sisters, or of the Persians, among whom 
 marriages more dreadful still were allowed, and 
 with yet better reason the exception of any savage 
 tribes in whom the true humanity had disappeared, 
 can not be allowed any weight. They can not only 
 be regarded as violations of the divine order of 
 man s life ; not as evidences that we have falsely 
 imagined an order where there was none. Here 
 is a true voice of the people ; and on the grounds 
 laid down above, we have a right to assume this to 
 be a voice of God as well. And so too, with 
 respect to the existence of a First Cause, Creator 
 and Upholder of all things, the universal consent 
 and conviction of all people, the consensus gentium, 
 must be considered of itself a mighty evidence in 
 its favor; a testimony which God is pleased to 
 render to himself through his creatures. This man 
 or that, this generation or the other, might be de 
 ceived, but all men and all generations could not; 
 the vox populi makes itself felt as a vox Dei. The 
 existence here and there of an atheist no more dis 
 turbs our conclusion that it is of the essence of 
 
VOLT AT RK AND OTHER INFIDELS. 135 
 
 man s nature to believe in a God, than do sucli 
 monstrous births as from time to time find place, 
 children with two heads or with no arms, shake our 
 assurance that it is the normal condition of man to 
 have one head and two arms. 
 
 This last is one of the proverbs which may be 
 said to belong to the Apology for Natural Religion. 
 There are others, of which it would not be far 
 fetched to affirm that they belong to the Apology 
 for Revealed. Thus it was very usual with Vol 
 taire and other infidels of his time to appeal to the 
 present barrenness and desolation of Palestine, in 
 proof that it could never have supported the vast 
 population which the Scripture everywhere assumes 
 or affirms. A proverb in the language of the arch- 
 scoffer himself might, if he had given heed to it, 
 have put him on the right track, had he wished to 
 be put upon it, for understanding how this could 
 have been : As the man is worth, his land is worth* 
 Man is lord of his outward condition to a far great 
 er extent than is commonly assumed ; even climate 
 which seems at first sight so completely out of his 
 reach, it is his immensely to modify ; and if Nature 
 stamps herself on him, he stamps himself yet more 
 powerfully on Nature. 
 
 It is not a mere figure of speech, that of the psalm 
 ist, " A fruitful land maketh he barren for the wick 
 edness of them that dwell therein." (Ps. cvii. 34.) 
 
 * Tant vaut 1 homme, tant vaut sa terre. 
 
136 THE THEOLOGY OF PROVERBS. 
 
 God makes it barren, and ever less capable of nour 
 ishing its inhabitants ; but lie makes it so through 
 the sloth, the indolence, the short-sightedness of 
 those that should have dressed and kept it. In the 
 condition of a land may be found the echo, the re 
 flection, the transcript of the moral and spiritual 
 condition of those that should cultivate it ; where 
 one is waste, the other will be waste also. Under 
 the desolating curse of Mohammedan domination 
 the fairest portions of the earth have gone back 
 from a garden to a wilderness : but only let that 
 people for whom Palestine is yet destined return to 
 it again, and return a righteous nation, and in a 
 little while all the descriptions of its earlier fertility 
 will be more than borne out by its later, and it will 
 easily sustain its millions again. 
 
 How many proverbs, which can not be affirmed 
 to have been originally made for the kingdom of 
 lieaven, do yet in their highest fulfilment manifestly 
 belong to it, so that it seems as of right to claim 
 that for its own, even as it claims, or rather reclaims, 
 whatever else is good or true in the world, the 
 seeds of truth wherever dispersed abroad, as belong 
 ing rightfully to itself. Thus there is that beautiful 
 proverb, of which Pythagoras is reputed the author, 
 The things of friends are in common.* Where 
 does this find its exhaustive fulfilment, but in the 
 
THE DIVINE VOICES. 137 
 
 communion of saints, their communion not with 
 one another merely, though indeed this is a part 
 of its fulfilment, but in their communion with 
 him who is the friend of all good men ? That such 
 a conclusion lay legitimately in the words Socrates 
 plainly saw ; who argued from it, that since good 
 men were the friends of the gods, therefore what 
 ever things were the gods w r ere also theirs ; being, 
 when he thus concluded, as near as one who had 
 not the highest light of all, could be to that great 
 word of the apostle s, " All things are yours." 
 
 Nor can I otherwise than esteem the ancient 
 proverb as a very fine one, and one which we may 
 gladly claim for our own, Many meet the gods, but 
 few salute them. How often do the gods (for I will 
 keep in the language which this proverb suggests and 
 supplies) meet men in the shape of a sorrow which 
 might be a purifying one, of a joy which might ele 
 vate their hearts to thankfulness and praise ; in a 
 sickness or a recovery, a disappointment or a suc 
 cess ; and yet how few, as it must be sadly owned, 
 salute them how few recognise their august pres 
 ences in this joy or this sorrow, this blessing added 
 or this blessing taken away ! As this proverb has ref 
 erence to men s failing to see the Divine presences, 
 so let me observe, by the way, there is a very grand 
 French one which expresses the same truth, under 
 the image of a failing to hear the Divine voices, 
 those voices being drowned by the deafening hub- 
 
138 THE THEOLOGY OF PROVERBS. 
 
 bub of the world : The noise is so great, one can 
 not hear God thunder.* 
 
 Ilere is another proverb which the church has 
 long since claimed, at least in its import, for her 
 own : One man, no man.-\ I should find it very- 
 hard indeed to persuade myself that whoever uttered 
 it first, attached to it no deeper meaning than Eras 
 mus gives him -credit for namely, that nothing im 
 portant can be effected by a single man, destitute 
 of the help of his fellows.:]: The word is a far more 
 profound one than this, arid rests on that great truth 
 upon which the deeper thinkers of antiquity laid so 
 much stress namely, that in the idea the state 
 precedes the individual, man not being merely ac 
 cidentally gregarious, but essentially social. The 
 solitary man, it would say, is a monstrous concep 
 tion, so utterly maimed and crippled must he be ; 
 the condition of solitariness involving so entire a 
 suppression of all which belongs to the development 
 of that wherein the true idea of humanity resides, 
 of all which differences man from the beasts of the 
 field; and in this sense One man is no man and 
 this, I am sure, the proverb from the first intended. 
 Nor may we stop here. This word is capable of, 
 and seems to demand, a still higher application to 
 man, as a destined member of the kingdom of 
 
 * Le bruit est si fort, qu on n en tend pas Dieu tonner. 
 
 ^* Et j dv /p, oijsij djr/p. 
 
 \ Sensus est nihil egregium prsestari posse ab uno homine, omni 
 auxilio destituto. 
 
ONE MAN, NO MAN. 130 
 
 Heaven. But he can only be in training for tins, 
 when he is, and regards himself, as not alone, but 
 the member of a family. As one man he is no 
 man ; and the strength and value of what is called 
 church teaching is greatly this, that it does recog 
 nise and realize this fact, that it contemplates and 
 deals with the faithful man, not as isolated, but as 
 one of an organic body, with duties which flow as 
 moral necessities from his position therein ; rather 
 than by himself, and as one whose duties to others 
 are indeed only the exercise of private graces for 
 his own benefit. And all that are called church 
 doctrines, when they really understand themselves, 
 have their root and their real strength in that great 
 truth which this proverb declares, that One man is 
 no man, that only in a fellowship and communion 
 is or can any man be aught. 
 
 And then there is another proverb, which Plato 
 so loved to quote against the sophists, the men 
 who flattered and corrupted the nobler youth of 
 Athens, promising to impart to them easy short 
 cuts to the attainment of wisdom and knowledge 
 and philosophy ; and this, without demanding the 
 exercise of any labor or patience or self-denial on 
 their parts. But with the proverb, Good things are 
 hard,* he continually rebuked their empty preten 
 sions ; with this he made at least suspicious their 
 promises ; and this proverb, true in the sense where- 
 
 ra 
 
140 THE THEOLOGY OF PROVERBS. 
 
 in Plato used it and that sense was earnest and 
 serious enough yet surely reappears, glorified and 
 transfigured, but recognisable still, in the Savior s 
 words: "The kingdom of heaven is taken by vio 
 lence, and the violent take it by force." 
 
 This method of looking in proverbs for a higher 
 meaning than any which lies on their surface, or 
 which they seem to bear on their fronts or rather 
 of searching out their highest intention, and claim 
 ing that as their truest, even though it should not 
 be that seen in them by most, or that which lay 
 nearest to them at their first generation is one 
 that will lead us in many interesting paths. And 
 it is not merely those of heathen antiquity which 
 shall thus be persuaded often, and that without any 
 forcing, to render up a Christian meaning ; but (as 
 was indeed to be expected) still more often those 
 of a later time, even those which the world had 
 seemed to claim for its own, shall be found to move 
 in a spiritual sphere as their truest. Let me offer 
 in evidence of this these four or five, which come to 
 us from Italy : lie who has love in his heart, has 
 spurs in his sides. Love rules without law. Love 
 rules his kingdom without a sword. Love knows 
 nothing of labor. Love is the master of all arts* 
 Take these, even with the necessary drawbacks of 
 
 * Chi ha 1 amor nel petto, ha lo sprone a i fianchi. Amor regge 
 senza legge. (Cf. Rom. xiii. 9, 10.) Amor regge il suo regno senza 
 ppada. Amor nou conosce travaglio. (Cf. Gen. xxix. 20, 30.) Di 
 tutte le arti maestro o amoiv. 
 
WITNESSES FOR THE TRUTH. 
 
 my English translation, but still more in their origi 
 nal beauty ; and how exquisitely do they set forth, 
 in whatever light you regard them, the free creative 
 impulses of love, its delight to labor and to serve; 
 how worthily do they glorify the kingdom of love 
 as the only kingdom of a free and joyful obedience. 
 While yet at the same time, if we would appreciate 
 them at all their worth, is it possible to stop short 
 of an application of them to that kingdom of love, 
 which, because it is in the highest sense such, is 
 is also a kingdom of heaven? And then, what 
 precious witness do these utterances contain, the 
 more precious as current among a people nursed in 
 the theology of Rome, against the shameless asser 
 tion that selfishness is the only motive sufficient to 
 produce good (?) works: for in such an assertion 
 the Romish impugners of a free justification con 
 stantly deal, charging this which we hold, of our 
 justification by faith only, which when translated 
 into the language of ethics is at least as important 
 in the province of morality as it is in that of faith, 
 with being an immoral doctrine, and not so fruitful 
 in deeds of love as one which should connect these 
 deeds with a selfish thought of promoting our own 
 safety thereby. 
 
 There are proverbs which reach the height of 
 evangelical morality. " Little gospels * the Span 
 iard has somewhat too boldly entitled his ; yet are 
 
 * Evangelios pequefios. 
 
142 THE THEOLOGY OF PKO VERBS. 
 
 there certainly many which at once we feel could 
 nowhere have arisen or obtained their circulation 
 but under the influence of Christian faith, being in 
 spirit, and often in form as well as in spirit, the 
 outbirths of it. Thus is it with that exquisitely 
 beautiful proverb of our own, The way to heaven is 
 ~by Weeping-Cross;* nor otherwise with the Span 
 ish, God never ivounds with loth hands\ not with 
 both, for he ever reserves one with which to bind 
 up and to heal. And another Spanish, evidently 
 intended to give the sum and substance of all which 
 in life is to be desired the most, Peace and patience , 
 and death with penitence^ gives this sum certainly 
 only as it presents itself to the Christian eye. And 
 this of ours is Christian both in form and in spirit : 
 Every cross hath its inscription the name, that 
 is, inscribed upon it, of the person for whom it was 
 shaped. It was intended for those shoulders upon 
 which it is laid, and will adapt itself to them: that 
 fearful word is never true which a spirit greatly 
 vexed spake in the hour of its impatience : " I have 
 little faith in the paternal love which I need ; so 
 ruthless or so negligent seems the government of 
 this earth. " 
 
 * Der Weg zum Himmel geht durch Kreuzdorn. Compare the 
 medieval obverse of the same: Via Crucis, via lucis. 
 
 f No hiere Dios con dos manos. 
 
 \ Paz y paciencia, y muerte con penitencia. 
 
 Memoirs of Margaret Fuller, vol. 3, p. 266. In respect of words 
 like these, wrung out from moments of agony, and not the abiding 
 convictions of the utterer, may we not venture to hope that our own 
 
CHRISTIAN PROVERBS. 143 
 
 So too is it with that ancient German proverb, 
 When God loathes aught, men presently loathe it 
 too.* He who first uttered this must have been 
 one who had watched long the ways by which 
 shame and honor travel in this world ; and, in this 
 watching, must have noted how it ever came to 
 pass that even worldly honor tarried not long with 
 them from whom the true honor which cometh 
 from God had departed. For the worldly honor is 
 but a shadow and reflex that waits upon the heav 
 enly ; it may indeed linger for a little, but it will 
 be only for a little, after it is divorced from its 
 substance. Where the honor from him has been 
 withdrawn, he causes in one way or another the 
 honor from men, ere long, to be withdrawn too. 
 When he loathes, presently man loathes also. The 
 saltless salt is not merely cast out by him, but is 
 trodden under foot of men (Matt. v. 13). A Louis 
 the Fifteenth s death-bed is, in its way, as hideous 
 to the natural as it is to the spiritual eye.f 
 
 It would be interesting to collect, as with rever 
 ence one might, variations on scriptural proverbs or 
 sayings, which the proverbs of this world supply : 
 
 proverb, For mad ivords deaf ears, is often graciously true, even in 
 the very courts of heaven ? 
 
 * Wenn Gott ein Ding verdreufst, so vefdreufst es auch bald die 
 Menschen. 
 
 j- The following have all a right to be termed Christian proverbs: 
 Chi non vuol servir ad un solo Signor, a molti ha da servir ; E padron 
 del mondo chi lo disprezza, schiavo chi lo apprezza; Quando Dios 
 quiere, con todos vientos llueve. 
 
THE THEOLOGY OF PROVERBS. 
 
 and this, both in those cases where the latter have 
 grown out of the former, owing more nearly or 
 more remotely their existence to them, and in those 
 also where they are independent of them so far, 
 that is, as anything true can be independent of the 
 absolute truth. Some of those which follow evi 
 dently belong to one of these classes, some to the 
 other. Thus Solomon has said, "It is better to 
 dwell in the corner of the housetop than with a 
 brawling woman in a wide house" (Prov. xxi. 9) ; 
 and again, " Better a dry morsel and quietness there 
 with, than a house full of sacrifices with strife" 
 (Prov. xvii. 1). With these compare the two prov 
 erbs, a Latin and a Spanish, adduced below.* The 
 psalmist has said, " As he loved cursing, so let it 
 come unto him" (Ps. cix. 17). The Turks express 
 their faith in this same law of the divine retalia 
 tions : Curses, like chickens, always come home to 
 roost / they return, that is, to those from whom 
 they went forth. In the Yoruba language there is 
 a proverb to the same effect, Ashes always fly hack 
 in the face of him that throws them; while our 
 own, Harm watch, harm catch, and the Spanish, 
 Who sows thorns, let him not go unshod,^ are utter 
 ances of very nearly the same conviction. Our 
 Lord declares, that without his Father there falls 
 
 f Non quam late sed quam Isete habites, refert Mas vale un 
 pedazo de pan con amor, que gallinas con dolor. 
 
 * Quien siembra abrojos, no ande descalzo. Compare the Latin : 
 Si vultur es, cadaver expecta. 
 
SCRIPTURAL PROVERBS. 145 
 
 no single sparrow to the ground, that " not one of 
 them is forgotten before God" (Luke xii. 6). The 
 same truth of & providentia specialissima (between 
 which and no providence at all there is indeed no 
 tenable position) is asserted in the Catalan proverb, 
 No leaf moves ~bnt God wills it* Again, he has 
 said, " No man oan serve two masters" (Matt. vi. 
 24:). And the Spanish proverb, He who has to 
 serve two* masters, has to lie to one.\ Or compare 
 with Matt. xix. 29, this remarkable Arabic proverb, 
 Purchase the next world with this, so shalt thou 
 win both. He has spoken of " mammon of unrigh 
 teousness;" indicating thereby, in Leigh ton s words, 
 that " iniquity is so involved in the notion of riches, 
 that it can very hardly be separated from them ;" 
 and this phrase Jerome illustrates by a proverb 
 that would not otherwise have reached us: "That 
 saying," he says, " appears true to me : A rich man 
 is either himself an unjust one, or the heir of one"$ 
 Again, the Lord has said, " Many be called, but few 
 chosen" (Matt. xx. 16) ; many have the outward 
 marks of a Christian profession, few the inner sub 
 stance. Some early fathers loved much to brinsr 
 
 *j O 
 
 * No se mou la fulla, que Deu no ha vulla. This is one of the 
 proverbs of which the peculiar grace and charm nearly disappears 
 in the rendering. 
 
 f Quien a dos senores ha de servir, al uno ha de inentir. 
 
 \ Verum mihi videtur illud ; Dives aut iuiquus, ant iniqui hares. 
 Out of a sense of the same, as I take it, the striking Italian proverb 
 had its rise : Mai divento fixime grande, chi non y entrasse acqua 
 tor bid a. 
 
14:6 THE THEOLOGY OF PKOVEIIBS. 
 
 into comparison with this a Greek proverb, spoken 
 indeed quite independently of it, and long pre 
 viously, and the parallel certainly is a singularly 
 happy one: the thyrsus-bearers are many, l>ut the 
 bacchants few y* many assume the signs and out 
 ward tokens of inspiration, whirling the thyrsus 
 aloft; but those whom the god indeed fills with his 
 spirit are few all the while. f 
 
 It has been sometimes a matter of consideration 
 to me whether we of the clergy might not make 
 larger use, though of course it would be only oc 
 casional, of proverbs in our public teaching than 
 we do. Great popular preachers of time past or, 
 seeing that this phrase has now so questionable a 
 sound, great preachers for the people, such as have 
 found their way to the universal heart of their fel 
 lows, addressing themselves not to that which some 
 men had different from others, but to that rather 
 which each had in common with all have been ever 
 
 * IToXXru r:n vap9r)KO(l>6(,i)i, Travfioi di re (laK^Dt. 
 
 \ The fact which this proverb proclaims, of a great gulf existing 
 oetween what men profess and what they are, is one too frequently 
 repeating itself and thrusting itself on the notice of all, not to have 
 found its utterance in an infinite variety of forms, although none 
 perhaps so deep and poetical as this. Thus there is another Greek 
 line, fairly represented by this Latin: 
 
 Qui tauros stimulent multi, sed rams arator ; 
 
 and there is the classical Roman proverb: Non omnes qui habent 
 oitharam, sunt citharoodi; and the medieval rhyming verse: 
 
 Non est venator quivis per cornua flator ; 
 
 and this Eastern word : Hast Ihon mounted the pufpif, than art not 
 therefore a preacher : with many mor. 
 
PKOVEKBS IN SEKIIOXS. 
 
 great employers of proverbs. Thus lie who would 
 know the riches of those in the German tongue, 
 with the vigorous manifold employment of which 
 they are capable, will find no richer mine to dig in 
 than the works of Luther. And such employment 
 of them would, I believe, with our country congre 
 gations, be especially valuable. Any one, who by 
 after investigation has sought to discover how much 
 our rustic hearers carry away even from the ser 
 mons to which they have attentively listened, will 
 find that it is hardly ever the course and tenor of 
 the argument, supposing the discourse to have con 
 tained such ; but if anything was uttered, as it 
 used so often to be by the best puritan preachers, 
 tersely, pointedly, epigrammatically, this will have 
 stayed by them, while all beside has gone. Now, 
 the merits of terseness and point, which have caused 
 other words to be remembered, are exactly those 
 which signalize the proverb, and generally in a yet 
 higher degree. 
 
 It need scarcely be observed, that, if thus used, 
 they will have to be employed with prudence and 
 discretion, and with a careful selection. Thus, even 
 with the example of so grave a divine as Bishop 
 Sanderson, I should hesitate to employ in a sermon 
 such a proverb as Over shoes, over boots one 
 which he declares to be the motto of some, who 
 having advanced a certain way in sin, presently be 
 come utterly wretchless, caring not, and counting 
 
14:8 THE THEOLOGY OF PROVERBS. 
 
 it indifferent how much further they advance. Nor 
 would I exactly recommend such use of a proverb 
 as St. Bernard makes, who, in a sermon on the 
 angels, desiring to show, a priori^ the extreme 
 probability of their active and loving ministries in 
 the service of men, adduces the Latin proverb, Who 
 loves me, loves my dog;* and proceeds to argue 
 thus : We are the dogs under Christ s table ; the 
 angels love him, they therefore love us. 
 
 But, although not exactly thus, the thing, I am 
 persuaded, might be done, and with profit. Thus, 
 in a discourse warning against sins of the tongue, 
 there are many words which we might produce of 
 our own to describe the mischief it inflicts, that 
 would be natter, duller, less likely to be remem 
 bered than the old proverb, The tongue is not steely 
 but it cuts. On God s faithfulness in sustaining, 
 upholding, rewarding his servants, there are feebler 
 things which we might bring out of our own treas 
 ure-house, than to remind our hearers of that word, 
 He who serves God, serves a good Master. And 
 this one might sink deep, telling of the enemy 
 whom every one of us has the most to fear : No 
 man has a worse friend than he brings with him 
 from liome. It stands in striking agreement with 
 Augustine s remarkable prayer, "Deliver me from 
 
 * Qui me am at, amat et canem meum. (In Fest. S. Mich., Serm. 
 1, 3.) 
 
PROVERBS IN SERMONS. 149 
 
 the evil man, from myself."* Or again, 111 weeds 
 grow apace; with how lively an image does this 
 set forth to us the rank, luxuriant up-growth of sin 
 ful lusts and desires in the garden of an uncared- 
 for, unterided heart. I know not whether we might 
 presume sufficient quickness of apprehension on the 
 part of our hearers to venture on the following : The 
 horse which draws its halter is not quite escaped ; 
 but I can hardly imagine a happier illustration of 
 the fact, that so long as any remnant of a sinful 
 habit is retained by us, so long as we draw this 
 halter, we make but an idle boast of our liberty ; 
 we may, by aid of that which we still drag with us, 
 be at any moment again entangled altogether in 
 the bondage, from which we seemed to have en 
 tirely escaped. 
 
 In every language, some of its noblest proverbs, 
 such as oftentimes are admirably adapted for this 
 application of which I am speaking, are those em 
 bodying men s confidence in God s moral govern 
 ment of the world, in his avenging righteousness, 
 however much there may be in the confusions of 
 the present evil time to provoke a doubt or even 
 a denial of this. Thus, Punishment is lame, hut it 
 comes which, if not old, yet rests on an image de 
 rived from antiquity is good; although inferior 
 in every way, in energy of expression as in fulness 
 of sense, to the ancient Greek one : The mill of 
 
 * Libera tne ab homine malo, a meipso. 
 
150 THE THEOLOGY OF PROVERBS. 
 
 God grinds late, lut grinds to powder;* for this 
 brings in the further thought, that his judgments? 
 however long they tarry, yet when they arrive are 
 crushing ones. There is, indeed, another of our 
 own, not unworthy to be set beside this, announcing, 
 though with quite another image, the same fact of 
 the tardy but terrible arrivals of judgment: God 
 comes with leaden feet, ~but strikes with iron hands. 
 And then, how awfully sublime another which has 
 come clown to us as part of the wisdom of the 
 ancient heathen world; I mean the following: The 
 feet of the (avenging) deities are shod with wool.\ 
 Here a new thought is introduced : the noiseless 
 approach and advance of these judgments, as noise 
 less as the steps of one whose feet were wrapped in 
 wool the manner in which they overtake secure 
 sinners even in the hour of their utmost security. 
 Who that has studied the history of the great 
 crimes and criminals of the world, but will with a 
 shuddering awe set his seal to the truth of this 
 proverb? Indeed, meditating on such and on the 
 source from which we have derived them, one is 
 sometimes tempted to believe that the faith in a 
 Divine retribution evermore making itself felt in 
 the world, this sense of a Nemesis, as men used to 
 
 d\iov<ri ^ivX^t 
 
 "W- may compare the Latin: Habet Deus suas horns, et moras; 
 and the Spanish : Dios no se quoja, mas lo suyo no lo deja. 
 f Dii laneos habent pedes. 
 
CURIOSITY ABOUT EVIL. 151 
 
 cull it, was stronger and deeper in the earlier and 
 better clays of heathendom, than alas! it is in a 
 sunken Christendom now. 
 
 But to resume. Even those proverbs which have 
 acquired a use which seems to unite at once the 
 trivial and the profane, may yet, on closer inspec 
 tion, be found to be very far from having either 
 triviality or profaneness cleaving to them. There 
 is one, for instance, often taken lightly enough 
 upon the lips, Talk of the devil, and he is sure to 
 appear ; or, as it used to be, Talk of the devil, and 
 his imps will appear ; or, as in German it is, Paint 
 the devil on the wall, and he will show himself 
 anon : which yet contains truth serious and impor 
 tant enough, if we would only give heed to it; it 
 contains, in fact, a very solemn warning against a 
 very dangerous sin I mean, curiosity about evil. 
 It has been often noticed, and is a very curious 
 psychological fact, that there is a tendency in a 
 great crime to reproduce itself to call forth, that 
 i=s, other crimes of the same character: and there is 
 :i fearful response which the evil we may hear or 
 read about, is in danger of finding in our own 
 hearts. This danger, then, assuredly makes it true 
 wisdom and a piece of moral prudence, on the part 
 of all to whom this is permitted, to avoid knowing 
 or learning about the evil ; especially when neither 
 duty nor necessity oblige them thereto. It is men s 
 wisdom to talk as little about the devil, either with 
 
152 THE THEOLOGY OF PltO VERBS. 
 
 themselves or with others, as they can, lest he np- 
 pear to them. " I agree with you," says Niebuhr 
 very profoundly in one of his letters,* " that it is 
 better not to read books in which you make the ac 
 quaintance of the devil." And certainly there is a 
 remarkable commentary on this proverb, so inter 
 preted, in the earnest warning given to the children 
 of Israel, that they should not so much as inquire 
 how the nations which were before them in Canaan, 
 served their gods, with what cruelties, with what 
 abominable impurities, lest through this inquiry 
 they should be themselves entangled in the same 
 (Deut. xii. 29, 30). They were not to talk about 
 the devil, lest he should appear to them. 
 
 And other proverbs, too, which at first sight may 
 seem over-familiar with the name of the great 
 enemy of mankind, yet contain lessons which it 
 would be an infinite pity to lose ; as this German, 
 Where the devil can not come, he will send fi a 
 proverb of very serious import, which excellently 
 sets out to us the penetrative character of tempta 
 tions, and the certainty that they will follow and 
 find men out in their secretest retreats. It rebukes 
 the absurdity of supposing that by any outward 
 arrangements, cloistral retirements, flights into the 
 wilderness, sin can be kept at a distance. So far 
 
 * Life, vol. i., p. 312. 
 
 f Wo der Teufel nicht bin mag kommen, da send er seinen 
 Boten bin. 
 
PROVERBS NOT PROFANE. 153 
 
 from this, temptations will inevitably overleap all 
 these outward and merely artificial barriers which 
 may be raised up against them ; for our great 
 enemy is as formidable from a seeming distance as 
 in close combat; where he can not come, he will 
 send. There are others of the same family, as the 
 following: The devil? s meal is half "bran or all 
 bran, as the Italians still more boldly proclaim it;* 
 unrighteous gains are sure to disappoint the getter ; 
 the pleasures of sin, even in this present time, are 
 largely dashed with its pains. And this, He had 
 need of a long spoon that eats with the devil / men 
 fancy they can cheat the arch-cheater, can advance 
 in partnership with him up to a certain point, and 
 then, whenever the connection becomes too dan 
 gerous, break it off at their will; being sure in this 
 to be miserably deceived. Granting these and the 
 like to have been often carelessly uttered, yet they 
 all rest upon a true moral basis in the main. 
 
 I have adduced in the course of these lectures 
 no inconsiderable number of proverbs, and have 
 sought for the most part to draw from them lessons, 
 which were lessons in common for us all. There 
 is one, however, which I must not pass over, for I 
 feel that it contains an especial lesson for myself, 
 and a lesson which I should do wisely and well, 
 at this present time, to lay to heart. When the 
 Spaniards would describe a tedious writer, one who 
 
 * La farina del cliavolo se ne va in semola. 
 
 7* 
 
154: THE THEOLOGY OF PROVERBS. 
 
 possesses the art of exhausting the patience of his 
 readers, they say of him, He leaves nothing in his 
 inkstand. The phrase is a singularly happy one ; 
 for assuredly there is no such secret of tediousness, 
 no such certain means of wearing out the attention 
 of our readers or our hearers, as the attempt to say 
 everything ourselves, instead of leaving something 
 to be filled up by their intelligence ; while the 
 merits of a composition are often displayed as 
 really, if not so prominently, in what is passed over 
 as in what is set down ; in nothing more than in 
 the just measure of the confidence which it shows 
 in the capacities and powers of those to whom it is 
 addressed. I would not willingly come under the 
 condemnation which waits on them who thus leave 
 nothing in their inkstand / and, lest I should do 
 so, I will bring now this my final lecture to its 
 close, and ask you to draw out for yourselves those 
 further lesson s from proverbs, which I am sure they 
 are abundantly capable of yielding. 
 
APPENDIX. 
 
 ON THE METRICAL LATIN PROVERBS OF THE 
 MIDDLE AGES. (See p. 37.) 
 
 I HAVE not seen anywhere brought together a col 
 lection of these medieval proverbs cast into the form 
 of a rhyming hexameter. Erasmus, though he often 
 illustrates the proverbs of the ancient world by those of 
 the new, does not quote, as far as I am aware, through 
 the whole of his enormous collection, a single one of 
 these which occupy a middle place between the two ; a 
 fact which in its way is curiously illustrative of the 
 degree to which the attention of the great Humanists, 
 at the revival of learning, was exclusively directed to 
 the classical literature of Greece and Rome. Yet 
 proverbs in this form exist in considerable number; 
 being of very various degrees of merit, as will be seen 
 from the following selection ; in which some are keen 
 and piquant enough, while others are of very subordi 
 nate value ; those which seemed to me utterly valueless 
 and they were not few I have excluded altogether, 
 the reader familiar with proverbs, will detect corre 
 spondents to very many of them, besides the few which 
 I have quoted, in one modern language or another, often 
 in many. 
 
156 APPENDIX. 
 
 Accipe, sume, cape, tria sunt gratissima Papae. 
 
 Let me observe here, once for all, that the lengthening of the 
 final syllable in cape, is not to be set down to the ignorance 
 or carelessness of the writer; but in the theory of the me 
 dieval hexameter, the unavoidable stress or pause on the first 
 syllable of the third foot was counted sufficient to lengthen 
 the shortest syllable in that position. 
 
 Ad secreta poll curas extcndere noli. 
 -ZEgro sanato, frustra dices, Numerate. 
 Amphora sub veste raro portatur honeste. 
 Ante Dei vultum niliil uuquam restat inultum. 
 Ante molam primus qui venit, non molat imus. 
 
 A rule of natural equity: Prior tempore, prior jure; First 
 come, first serve. " Whoso first cometh to the mill, first 
 grint." Chaucer. 
 
 Arbor naturam dat fructibus atque figuram. 
 Arbor ut ex fructu, sic nequam noscitur actu. 
 Ars compensabit quod vis tibi magna negabit. 
 Artem natura superat sine vi, sine cura. 
 Aspera vox, Ite, sed vox est blanda, Venite. 
 An allus on to Matt xxv. 34, 41. 
 
 - 
 
 Cari rixantur, rixantcs conciliantur. 
 Carius est carum, si prsegustatur am arum. 
 Casus dementis corrcctio fit sapicntis. 
 Catus siepe satur cum capto mure jocatur. 
 Cautus homo cavit, si quern natura notavit. 
 Conjngium sine prole, dies veluti sine sole. 
 Contra vim mortis non herbula crescit in hortis. 
 Cui puer assuescit, major dimittere nescit. 
 
 The same appears also in a pentameter, and under an Horatian 
 image : Quod nova testa capit, inveterata sapit 
 
LATIN PRO VERBS. 157 
 
 Cum jocus est verus, jocus est mains atque scverus. 
 So the Spanish: Malas son las burlas verdaderas. 
 
 Curvum se prsebet quod in uncum crescere debet. 
 
 Curia Romana non quserit ovem sine lan&. 
 
 Dat bene, dat multum, qui dat cum munere vultum. 
 
 "He that showeth mercy, with cheerfulness. (Rom. xii. 8.) 
 Cf. Ecclus. xxxv. 9 ; SENECA, De Bencf., i. 1. 
 
 Deficit ambobus qui vult servire duobus. 
 Dormit secure, cui non est functio curse. 
 
 Far from court, far from care. 
 
 Ebibe vas totum, si vis cognoscere potum. 
 Est facies testis, quales intrinsecus estis. 
 Est nulli certum cui pugna velit dare sertum. 
 Ex lingua stulta veniunt incommoda multa. 
 Ex minimo crescit, sed non cito fama quiescit. 
 Foemma ridendo flendo fallitque canendo. 
 Frangitur ira gravis, cum fit responsio suavis. 
 Fures in lite pandunt abscondita vitae. 
 
 So in Spanish : Rifieu les comrades, y dicense las verdades. 
 
 Furtivus potus plenus dulcedine totus. 
 
 Hoc retine verbum, frangit Deus omne superbum. 
 
 Ilia mihi patria est, ubi pascor, non ubi nascor. 
 
 Impedit omne forum defectus denariorum. 
 
 In vestimentis non stat sapientia mentis. 
 
 In vili veste nemo tractatur honeste. 
 
 The Russians have a worthier proverb : A man s reception is 
 according to his coat ; his dismissal according to his sense. 
 
160 APPENDIX. 
 
 Cochlea consiliis, in factis esto volucris. 
 
 Dat Deus omne bonum, sed non per cornua taurum. 
 
 The Chinese say : Even the ripest fruit does not drop into 
 one s mouth ; and another Latin : Non volat in buccas assa 
 columba tuas. 
 
 Ense cadunt multi, perimit sed crapula plures. 
 Furfure se miscens porcorum dentibus estur. 
 
 With a slight variation the Italian : Chi si fa fango, il porco 
 lo calpesta. 
 
 Ipsa dies quandoque parens, quandoque noverca. 
 Invidus liaud eadem semper quatit ostia Daemon. 
 Mirari, non rimari, sapientia vera est. 
 Nomina si nescis, peril et cognitio rerum. 
 Non stillant omnes quas cernis in aere nubes. 
 Non venit ad silvam, qui cuncta rubeta veretur. 
 Pro ratione Deus dispertit frigora vestis. 
 Quod rarum carum ; vilescit quotidianum. 
 Sermones blandi non radunt ora loquentis. 
 Stultorum calami carbones, moania chartse. 
 
 So the French : Muraille blanche, papier des sots. 
 
 Add further a few which occupy two lines: 
 
 Argue consul turn, te diliget ; argue stultum, 
 Avertet vultum, nee te dimittet inultum. 
 
 Balnea cornici non prosunt, nee meretrici ; 
 Nee meretrix mimda, nee cornix alba fit imda. 
 
LATIN PROVERBS. 161 
 
 Dives eram dudum ; feccrunt me tria nudum ; 
 Alea, vina, Venus ; tribus his sum factus egenus. 
 
 Quando mulcetnr villanus, pejor habetur ; 
 TTngciitem pungit, pungentem rusticus ungit. 
 
 Latin medieval ones in the same spirit abound : among others 
 this detestable one with its curious triple rhyme : Rustica 
 gens est optima flens, et pessima riden?. 
 
 Si bene barbatum faceret sua barba beatum, 
 Nullus in hoc circo queat esse beatior liirco. 
 
 Si qua sede sedes, et sit tibi commoda sedes, 
 Ilia sede sede, nee ab ilia sede recede. 
 
 Hoc scio pro certo, quod si cum stercore certo, 
 Vinco seu vincor, semper ego maculor. 
 
 Multum deliro, si cuique placere require ; 
 Omni a qui potuit, liac sine dote fuit. 
 
 Permutant mores homines, cum dantur honores : 
 Oorde stat inflato pauper, lionore dato. 
 
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