"Then comes a reckoning when the banquet's o'er,
The dreadful reckoning, and men smile no more."
As an alternative to a picture so sombre, we may quote the declaration, that "Chastisement is the knife that tells we still abide in the Vine."
Detraction, hypocrisy, ingratitude are all scourged by proverbs, but one feels over and over again how very much the proverbial wisdom of our ancestors seemed to dwell on the darker side of things. One may find a dozen adages that have ingratitude as their theme, but scarcely one that sings the praise of sweet thankfulness, and in like manner pretension, boasting, time-serving, self-interest have their attendant proverbs, while the praise of gentle modesty and sweet self-surrender finds little or no place. It may, perhaps, be said that this latter end is reached practically by the denouncing of the evil, but this is scarcely so—a scathing attack on falsehood is in its time needful, but there is still place and need for the recognition of the spotless beauty of truth. Denunciation may do much, but sweet persuasiveness yet more.
Shakespeare, in his "Cymbeline," writes of deadly slander—
"Whose edge is sharper than the sword; whose tongue
Outvenoms all the worms of Nile";
and again, in "Much Ado about Nothing," we find the line—"Done to death by slanderous tongues"; and yet again warns us that "No might nor greatness in mortality can censure 'scape," and that "Back-wounding calumny the whitest virtue strikes." Byron writes in his "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage" of those whose evil task is "Sapping a solemn creed with solemn sneer," and Thomson tells how "Still the world prevailed, and its dread laugh,"—a laugh "which scarce the firm philosopher can scorn."
The following adages may be quoted:—"Envy shoots at others and wounds itself"; "Envy never does a good turn but when it designs an evil one"; "Malice seldom wants a mark to aim at"; "'They say' is a poisoned arrow." The Welsh say—"Faults are thick where love is thin." Other sayings are—"One jeer going forth brings back another"; "Once in people's mouths, 'tis hard to get out of them again"; "Those who have most need of credit seldom get much"; "The evil which issues from thy mouth falls into thy bosom"; "The sting of a reproach is in the truth of it";[253:A] "He that prepares a net for another should not shut his own eyes"; "Respect is better got by deserving than by exacting"; "Little minds, like weak liquors, are soon soured"; "Suspicion, like bats, fly by twilight"; "In a little mind everything is little"; "Despise none and despair of none"; "Faint praise is disparagement"; "A blow from a frying-pan blacks, though it may not hurt"; "Truth is truth, though spoken by an enemy"; "Harm set, harm get"; "Envy never enriched any man."
In a curious manuscript of the fifteenth century may be found "the answere which God gave to a certyn creture that desired to wit whate thinge was moost plesure to hym in this worlde." The answer is a very full one, fuller than we can quote, but it includes the following precepts:—"Suffre noysous wordis with a meke harte, for that pleseth me more than thow beate thy body with as many roddys as growen in an hundred wodys. Have compassion on the seeke and poore, for that pleaseth me more than thow fasteth fifty wynter brede and water. Saye no bakbyting wordis, but shon from them and love thy nayghber and turne alle that he saithe or dothe to good, me onely love and alle other for me, for that pleseth me more than if thowe every daye goo upon a whele stikking fulle of nayles that shulde prik thy bodye." Another manuscript of the same date that has come under our notice, in the Library of Jesus College, Cambridge, introduces a personification of the deadly sins, and each is treated with much graphic power, thus, under the heading of "Invidia" we find—
"I am full sory in my hert
Of other mens welefare and whert:
I ban and bakbyte wykkedly,
And hynder all that I may sikerly."
The sneaking treachery of the envious man, grieved to the heart at the welfare of others, and doing them what evil he can safely compass, is very forcibly painted, and this of "Ira," in its picture of downright brutality, is as graphic—