It will be my endeavour 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 before 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 manliness which characterize so many of them, their morality, their theology, will all by turns come under our consideration. Yet shall I beware of presenting them to you as though they embodied these nobler qualities only. I shall not keep out of sight that there are proverbs, coarse, selfish, unjust, cowardly, profane; “maxims” wholly undeserving of the honour implied by that name. [89] Still as my pleasure, and I doubt not yours, is rather in the wheat than in the tares, I shall, while I do not conceal this, prefer to dwell in the main on the nobler features which they present.

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Poetic imagery.

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 whatever unites both these conditions, will have poetry, imagination, in it. For little as the people’s craving after wholesome nutriment of the imaginative faculty, 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 palled 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, and proverbs being, as we have seen, the sayings that have found favour 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 beforehand; our closer examination of them will confirm the confidence which we have been bold to entertain.

Thus we may expect to find that they will contain often bold imagery, striking comparisons; and such they do. Let serve as an example our own: Gray hairs are death’s blossoms; [90] or the Italian: Time is an inaudible file; [91] or the Greek: Man a [72]bubble; [92] 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 another 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; or this other, also from the East: Hold all skirts of thy mantle extended, when heaven is raining gold; improve, that is, to the uttermost the happier crises of thy spiritual life; or this Indian, to the effect that good should be returned for evil: The sandal tree perfumes the axe that fells it; or this one, current in the Middle Ages: Whose life lightens, his words thunder; [93] or once more, this Chinese: Towers are measured by their shadows, and great men by their calumniators; however this last may have somewhat of an artificial air as tried by our standard of the proverb.

There may be poetry in a play upon words; and such we shall hardly fail to acknowledge in that beautiful Spanish proverb: La verdad es siempre verde, which I must leave in its original form; for were I to translate it, The truth is always green, [73]its charm and chief beauty would be looked for in vain. It finds its pendant and complement in another, which I must also despair of adequately rendering: Gloria vana florece, y no grana; 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: May 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.
Witty proverbs.

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; [94] 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, without making himself ridiculous by evermore proclaiming it to the world; or this of our own: When the devil is dead, he never wants a chief mourner; in other words, there is no abuse so enormous, no evil so flagrant, but that the interests[74] 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; [95] when evil men have it thus far their own way, then worst is best, and in the inverted hierarchy which is then set up, the foremost in badness is foremost also in such honour as is going. Or consider how happily the selfishness and bye-ends which too often preside at men’s very prayers are noted in this Portuguese: Cobblers go to mass, and pray that cows may die; [96] that is, that so leather may be cheap. Or, take another, a German one, noting with slightest exaggeration a measure of charity which is only too common: He will swallow an egg, and give away the shells in alms; or this from the Talmud, of which I will leave the interpretation to yourselves: All kinds of wood burn silently, except thorns, which crackle and call out, We too are wood.

The wit of proverbs 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; for indeed The more you stroke the cat’s tail, the more he raises his back; [97] and the Russians: Fools are not planted or sowed; they grow of themselves; while[75] the Spaniards: If folly were a pain, there would be crying in every house; [98] having further an exquisitely witty one on learned folly as the most intolerable of all follies: A fool, unless he know Latin, is never a great fool. [99] And here is excellently unfolded to us the secret of the fool’s confidence: Who knows nothing, doubts nothing. [100]

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, [101] I must fain Bohemian proverb. 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. [102] And another proverb, worthy to take[76] its place among the best even of the Spanish, charges the clergy with being the authors of the chiefest spiritual mischiefs which have risen up in the Church: By the vicar’s skirts the devil climbs up into the belfry. [103] 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. [104] And as for lawyers, this of the same period, Legista, nequista, [105] expresses itself not with such brevity only, but with such downright plainness of speech, that I shall excuse myself from attempting to render it into English. Nor do other sorts and conditions of men escape. “The miller tolling with his golden thumb,” has been often the object of malicious insinuations; and of him the Germans have a proverb: What is bolder than a miller’s neckcloth, which takes a thief by the throat every morning? [106] 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[77] offended, but only because I must needs hasten onward, that I leave this part of my subject without further development.
Proverbs about pride.

What a fine knowledge of the human heart will they often display. I know not whether this Persian saying on the subtleties of pride is a proverb in the very strictest sense of the word, but it is forcibly uttered: Thou shalt sooner detect an ant moving in the dark night on the black 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 we should have; [107] 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, [108] one which might almost seem to have been founded on the story of Diogenes, who, treading under his feet a rich carpet 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 admirable 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 splendours; 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.

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Sometimes in their subtle observation of life, they arrive at conclusions which we would very willingly question or reject, but to which it is impossible to refuse a certain amount of assent. Thus it is with the very striking German proverb: One foe is too many; and an hundred friends too few. [109] There speaks out in this a sense of how much more active a principle in this world will hate be sometimes than love. The hundred friends will wish you well; but the one foe will do you ill. Their benevolence will be ordinarily passive; his malevolence will be constantly active; it will be animosity, 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 cannot support one father; which, in so far as it rests upon a certain ground of truth, suggests 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 [79] 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 wisdom which has made the instincts of natural affection to run rather in the descending than in the ascending line; a wisdom to which this proverb, though with a certain exaggeration of the facts, bears witness.
French proverb.

How exquisitely delicate is the touch of this French proverb: It is easy to go afoot, when one leads one’s horse by the bridle. [110] How fine and subtle an insight into the inner workings of the human heart is here; how 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 with 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 esteeming the doing so too highly, nor setting it on a level with the trudging upon foot of him, who has no horse to fall back on at 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 [80] society, which repose on a tacit assumption that nobody shall have to do this work, are touched with a fine irony in this Arabic proverb: If I am master, and thou art master, who shall drive the asses? [111]

Again, how clever is the satire of the following Haytian 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 pretension of the mulatto race immediately above them. These, 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 furnished the latter being in fact the only sufferers, their blood that which alone was shed. All this the proverb uttered: Mulattoes fight, kids die. [112]

And proverbs, witty in themselves, often become wittier still in their application, like gems that acquire new brilliancy from their setting, or from some novel light in which they are held. No writer that I know of has an happier skill in thus adding Fuller’s use of proverbs. wit to the witty than Fuller, the Church historian. Let me confirm this assertion by one or two examples drawn from his writings. He is describing[81] the indignation, the outcries, the remonstrances, which the thousandfold extortions, the intolerable exactions of the Papal See gave birth to in England during 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; [113] the very loudness of the clamour 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, afterwards took mortal displeasure against him; this displeasure 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 Buckingham’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 cannot remember ever to have met any of the following, which yet[82] sound like proverbs—the first on solitude as preferable to ill fellowship: Better ride alone than have a thief’s company; [114] the second against certain who disparaged one whose excellencies they would have found it very difficult to imitate: They who complain that Grantham steeple stands awry, will not set a straighter by it, [115] and in this he warns against despising in any the tokens of honourable toil: Mock not a cobbler for his black thumbs. [116]

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 which 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. [117]
Wisdom of silence.

Thus, how many of these popular sayings and what good ones there are on the wisdom of governing the tongue,—I speak not now of those urging the duty, though such are by no means wanting,—but[83] the wisdom, prudence, and profi............