[33] Heywood’s “Dialogue, conteyninge the Number in Effecte of all the Proverbes in the English Tunge, 1561.” There are more editions of this little volume than Warton has noticed. There is some humour in his narrative, but his metre and his ribaldry are heavy taxes on our curiosity.
[34] The whole of Tusser’s “Five Hundred Pointes of Good Husbandrie,” 1580, was composed in quaint couplets, long remembered by the peasantry for their homely worldly wisdom. One, constructed for the bakehouse, runs thus:—
| “New bread is a drivell (waste); Much crust is as evil.” |
Another for the dairymaid assures her—
| “Good dairie doth pleasure; Ill dairie spends treasure.” |
Another might rival any lesson of thrift:—
| “Where nothing will last, Spare such as thou hast.” |
[35] Townshend’s Historical Collections, p. 283.
[36] It was published in 1616: the writer only catches at some verbal expressions—as, for instance:—
The vulgar proverb runs, “The more the merrier.”