Nile, and he will come up with a fish in his mouth; while of such a Fortunatus as this the Germans have a proverb: If he flung a penny on the roof, it would come down to him a dollar;* as, again, of the man in the opposite extreme of fortune, to whom the most unlikely calamities, and such as beforehand might seem to exclude one another, befall, they say: He would fall on his back, and break his nose.

In all this which I have just traced out, in the fact that the proverbs of a language are so frequently 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 alliterations which do not easily find their equivalents, or in other verbal happinesses such as these, lies the difficulty which is often felt, which I shall myself often feel in the course of these lectures, of transferring them without serious loss, nay, sometimes the impossibility of transferring them at all from one language to another. Oftentimes, to

* Würf er einen Groschen aufs Dach, fiel ihm Ein Thaler herunter.

Thus in respect of this German proverb:

Stultus und Stolz

Wachset aus Einem Holz;

its transfer into any other languages is manifestly impossible. The same may be affirmed of another, commending stay-at-home habits to the wife: Die Hausfrau

use an image of Erasmus, they are like those wines, (I believe the Spanish Valdepeñas is one,) of which the true excellence can only be known by those who drink them in the land which gave them birth. Transport them under other skies, or, which is still more fatal, empty them from vessel to vessel, and their strength and flavour will in great part have disappeared in the process.

Still this is rather the case, where we seek deliberately, and only in a literary interest, to translate 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 narrow limits in which it must confine itself allow it the very

soll nit sein eine Ausfrau; or again of this beautiful Spanish one: La verdad es siempre verde.

* Habent enim hoc peculiare pleraque proverbia, ut in eâ linguâ sonare postulant in quâ nata sunt; quod si in alienum sermonem demigrârint, multum gratiæ decedat. Quemadmodum sunt et vina quædam quæ recusant exportari, nec germanam saporis gratiam obtineant, nisi in his locis in quibus proveniunt.

smallest liberty of selection. And thus, presenting itself equally finished and complete in 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 youth;

but which in German runs thus,

Mutter-treu

Wird täglich neu;

and in French,

Tendresse 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 beforehand 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 an home. Having thus opened the subject, I shall reserve its further development for the lectures which follow.

26

LECTURE II.

THE GENERATION OF PROVERBS.

N my preceding lecture I occupied your attention with the form and definition of a proverb; let us proceed in the present to realize to ourselves, so far as this may be possible, 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 intellectual and moral inheritance. The world has now endured so long, and the successive 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 humanity in common, being the gathered fruits of all this its experience 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 their brevity and aptness, had amid a general wreck and ruin been preserved." These, the common property 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 brought it into living communication with the past. Thus, and through these channels, a vast number of Greek, Latin, and medieval proverbs live on with us, and with all the modern nations of the world.

It is, indeed, oftentimes a veritable surprise to discover the venerable age and antiquity of a proverb, which we have hitherto assumed to be quite a later birth of modern society. Thus we may perhaps 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 English 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 voluntary on his part, free-will offerings, and with this quoted the proverb, that it did not behove 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 favourites in the middle ages:

Si quis dat mannos, ne quære in dentibus annos.

Again, Liars should have good memories is a saying which probably we assume to be modern ; yet it is very far from so being. The same Jerome,