In the days of our forefathers the streets were narrow, and there were no pavements; while discharging pipes and running gutters by the sides of the walls made the centre of the road the more agreeable place for the traveller. Wheeled conveyances of divers sorts passing and repassing forced the foot-passenger to the side of the road, and any tumult or street fight would drive the conquered pell-mell to take refuge in the houses or to the shelter of the wall out of the rush. Hence the proverb, "The weakest goes to the wall." In "Romeo and Juliet" Sampson and Gregory are found in the market-place of Verona, and the former declares, "I will take the wall of any man or maid of Montague's"; to whom the latter unsympathetically replies, "That shows thee a weak slave, for the weakest goes to the wall."
The wisdom of our ancestors discovered that "He who is born to be hanged will never be drowned," and our readers will recall how in the "Tempest" Gonzalo comforts himself in the contemplation of the villainous ugliness of the boatswain. "I have great comfort," he says, "from this fellow: methinks he hath no drowning mark upon him; his complexion is perfect gallows. Stand fast, good fate, to his hanging! Make the rope of his destiny our cable, for our own doth little advantage! If he be not born to be hanged our case is miserable."
To make our list of quotations exhaustive, and therefore probably exhausting, is by no means necessary; we give but samples from the bulk, and in conclusion of our present chapter give some few of our commoner saws and one, or at most two, references to some old writer's work where it may be encountered. Naturally, the wording of some of the more ancient quotations is not always quite that of to-day.
"The potte may goo so longe to water that atte the last it is broken" we found in a manuscript of about the year 1545, entitled, "The book of the Knight of La Tour." The very ancient proverb, familiar to us in its Biblical garb, about the folly of the blind leading the blind, will be found in Gower's "Confessio Amantis"—
"As the blinde another ledeth,
And, till they falle, nothing dredeth."
The constant dropping that wears at length away a stone we found referred to in a manuscript of the time of Henry VIII. "So long may a droppe fall that it may perse a stone."
"The common proverb, as it is read,
That we should hit the nail on the head,"
is a couplet in a little book, "Wit Restor'd," issued in 1568, and we also find Skelton writing, "He hyt the nayle on the hede."
A caution to those who try and steer a deceitful course between those of opposing interests, treacherously allowing each to think they have exclusive support, has duly been crystallised into a proverb, and Lily introduces it in the following passage:—"Whatsouer I speake to men, the same also I speake to women. I meane not to run with the Hare and holde with the Hounde." "By hook or by crook" will be found in Spenser's "Fairie Queene." "Diamond cut diamond" is in Ford's play of "the Lover's Melancholy." "Every tub must stand upon its own bottom" occurs in the "Pilgrim's Progress." "He must have a long spoon that would eat with the devil" is found in Chaucer and Shakespeare, amongst other writers. That "The moon is made of green cheese" is re-asserted by Rabelais and in the pages of "Hudibras."
In Swift's "polite conversation," proverbs are thickly strewn. We find the old statement that "You must eat a peck of dirt before you die," the well-meant impertinence of "teaching one's grandmother to suck eggs," the communistic doctrine that "Sauce for the goose is no less sauce for the gander," and many other well-worn scraps of ancestral belief and practice. The wisdom of suiting your position to your circumstances, of cutting one's garment according to the material available, is emphasised in a "Health to the gentlemanly profession of Serving-Men," a brochure issued in 1598, where these worthies are warned, "You, with your fraternitie in these latter dayes cannot be content to shape your coate according to your cloth." In Marston's play of "What you Will," written in 1607, we have a familiar and homely caution borrowed from the experience of the kitchen—"Faith, Doricus, thy braine boils; keele it, keele it, or all the fatts in the fire," a proverb employed when by some inadvertence a man brings against himself a sudden blaze of wrath.
