K. Hen. I said so, dear Katharine; and I must not blush to affirm it.

Kath. O bon Dieu! les langues des hommes sont pleines de tromperies.”

Appropriately also to the locality of the Taming of the Shrew (act i. sc. 2, l. 24, vol. iii. p. 23), Hortensio’s house in Padua, is the Italian quotation.

“Pet. ‘Con tutto il core ben trovato,’ may I say.

Hor. Alla nostra casa ben venuto, molto honorato, signor mio Petrucio.”

We find only two Spanish sentences, those already quoted,—one being Pistol’s motto on his sword, Si fortuna me tormenta sperato me contenta; the other, that of the Prince of Macedon, on his shield, Piu por dulzura que por fuerza.

Similar proverbs and sayings abound both in Cervantes, who died in 1616, the year of Shakespeare’s death, and in the Spanish Emblem-books of an earlier date. I have very carefully examined the Emblems of Alciatus, translated into Spanish in 1549, but the nearest approach to the motto of the Prince of Macedon is, Que mas puede la eloquençia que la fortaliza (p. 124),—“Eloquence rather than force prevails,”—which may be taken from Alciat’s 180th Emblem, Eloquentia fortitudine præstantior.

Other Spanish Emblem-books of that day are the Moral Emblems of Hernando de Soto, published at Madrid in 1599, and Emblems Moralized, of Don Sebastian Orozco, published in the year 1610, also at Madrid; but neither of these gives the words of the second knight’s device. Nor are they contained in the Moral Triumphs, as they are entitled, of Francisco Guzman, published in 1587, the year after Whitney’s work appeared. The Moral Emblems, too, of Juan de Horozco, are without them,—an octavo, published at Segovia in 1589.

But, although there has been no discovery of this Spanish motto in a Spanish Emblem-book, the exact literal expression of it is found in a French work of extreme rarity—Corrozet’s “Hecatomgraphie,” Paris, 1540. There, at Emblem 28, Plus par doulceur que par force,[[94]]—“More by gentleness than by force,”—is the saying which introduces the old fable of the Sun and the Wind, and of their contest with the travellers. Appended are a symbolical woodcut and a French stanza,

Contre la froidure du vent,