Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: III. SOME SAVAGE PROVERBS. The German proverb, ' Speak, that I may see thee,' may be applied as truly to a whole community as to an individual. For proverbs—or, roughly defining, popular sayings—reflect conspicuously the general character of a nation, constituting its actual code of social, political, and moral philosophy, Besides the beauty and wisdom, from which alone many of them derive an imperishable charm, they serve as a kind of literature in miniature, in which the inner life of a nation is more clearly legible than in its more voluminous writings. And in spite of the general resemblance which seems to pervade the proverbial lore of the world, arising partly from the direct interchange of thought inseparable from international commerce of any kind, partly from a uniformity of experience—such, for example, as has impressed on all people the wisdom of caution and truth—there are yet well-marked differences in the proverbs of nations,which as clearly retain the records of their several histories as do their different laws and customs. Remarkable, therefore, as is the substantial similarity of proverbial codes, of which the general characteristic is a high sense of right coupled with a mournful consciousness of human infirmity, they betray often in the very expression of the same idea the individuality of their national birthplace. It is obvious, for instance, that, largely as all modern nations are indebted to a writer like ALsop for the thoughts they share in common, each nation severally will owe more of its wisdom to writers of its own, who, like Shakespeare or Cervantes, have, from greater familiarity with the manners, been more competent to express the feelings, of their different countries. But the way in which good proverbs, like good gold, find acceptance everywhe...