"Sirra, thou grashoper, thou shal skip from my sword as from a sithe. Ile cut thee out in collops and steakes and frye thee with the fier I shall strike from the pike of thy Bucklet."
To this appalling threat, not best adapted to soothe matters over, or pour oil on the troubled waters, Nicholas replies:
"Brag's a good dog: threatened folkes liue long."
Further quotation is quite needless; enough, amply enough, has been brought forward to convince us how terrible a bore the inveterate quoter of proverbs can readily become. We are prepared after this to sympathise entirely with the sentiments of old Fuller: "Adages and prouerbs are to be accounted only as Sauce to relish Meat with, but not as substantial Dishes to make a Meal on; and therefore were never good but upon proper Subjects and Occasions, where they may serve to give a lively Force and pleasant Turn to what is said: but to apply them wrong and crack them off too thick, like Sancho in 'Don Quixote,' is abominably foppish, ridiculous and nauseous." We had our eye on Sancho Panza, but any comments that we might have made on his conduct in cracking off proverbs so thick become needless, since Fuller has already said all that need be hurled against so hardened an offender.
A very curious early manuscript has come under our notice, in which the common proverbs of the time are quoted by one of the villains. It is arranged in stanzas of six lines, each being then followed by a proverb. This latter is sometimes in two lines and sometimes in one, but is in every case attributed to the villains, "Ce dit li vilains." It deals with the proverbs current in Bretaigne, and commences:
"Qui les proverbes fist
Premierement bien dist
Au tans qu'alors estoit
Or est tout en respit.
En ne chante ne lit
D'annor en nul endroit
'Que a la bone denrée
A mauvaise oubliée'
Ce dit li vilains."
This quaint old French may be thus Anglicised: "He who first made proverbs spoke well to the people of his time; now all is forgotten, people neither sing nor read of honour in any place. He who has the good ware has forgotten the bad—so says the villain." The moral does not seem somehow to quite fit, unless indeed we read it to mean that when people had abundant supply of this proverb-law they had the good, and were so enamoured of it that it had supplanted in their hearts all desire for what they once preferred—the evil that was now quite driven from their hearts and forgotten.
Another verse terminates thus:
"Qui n'aime son mestier
Ne son mestier lui
Ce dit li vilains"—
"Who likes not his business his business likes not him." Another proverb that remains a very familiar one, as to the folly of not taking full precautions, and only shutting the stable door when the horse has already been taken, appears as