Against disastres loue or firmness greater growes,

And makes each aduers change a witness to his loue.”

In several instances it is difficult to determine whether expressions which have the appearance of glancing at fables really do refer to them, or whether they are current sayings, passing to and fro without any defined ownership. Also it is difficult to make an exact classification of what belongs to the fabulous and what to the proverbial. Of both we might collect many more examples than those which we bring forward; but the limits of our subject remind us that we must, as a general rule, confine our researches and illustrations to the Emblem writers themselves. We take this opportunity of saying that we may have arranged our instances in an order which some may be disposed to question; but mythology, fable, and proverb often run one into the other, and the knots cannot easily be disentangled. Take a sword and cut them; but the sword though sharp is not convincing.

Horapollo, ed. 1551.

Section V.
EMBLEMS IN CONNEXION WITH PROVERBS.

PROVERBS are nearly always suggestive of a little narrative, or of a picture, by which the sentiment might be more fully developed. The brief moral reflections appended to many fables partake very much of the nature of proverbs. Inasmuch, then, as there is this close alliance between them, we might consider the Proverbial Philosophy of Shakespeare only as a branch of the Philosophy of Fable; still, as there are in his dramas many instances of the use of the pure proverb, and instances too of the same kind in the Emblem writers, we prefer making a separate Section for the proverbs or wise sayings.

Occasionally, like the Sancho Panza of his renowned contemporary, Michael de Cervantes Saavedra, 1549–1616,[[146]] Shakespeare launches “a leash of proverbial philosophies at once;” but with this difference, that the dramatist’s application of them is usually suggestive either of an Emblem-book origin, or of an Emblem-book destination. The example immediately in view is from the scene (3 Henry VI., act i. sc. 4, l. 39, vol. v. p. 245) in which Clifford and Northumberland lay hands of violence on Richard Plantagenet, duke of York; the dialogue proceeds in the following way, York exclaiming,—