Familiar Quotations / A Collection of Passages, Phrases, and Proverbs Traced to / Their Sources in Ancient and Modern Literature

by Unknown

For iii may keep a counsel if twain be away.[6:4]

The Ten Commandments of Love.

Footnotes

[2:1] In allusion to the proverb, "Every honest miller has a golden thumb."

[2:2] Fieldes have eies and woodes have eares.—Heywood: Proverbes, part ii. chap. v.

Wode has erys, felde has sigt.—King Edward and the Shepard, MS. Circa 1300.

Walls have ears.—Hazlitt: English Proverbs, etc. (ed. 1869) p. 446.

[3:1] Also in Troilus and Cresseide, line 1587.

To make a virtue of necessity.—Shakespeare: Two Gentlemen of Verona, act iv. sc. 2. Matthew Henry: Comm. on Ps. xxxvii. Dryden: Palamon and Arcite.

In the additions of Hadrianus Julius to the Adages of Erasmus, he remarks, under the head of Necessitatem edere, that a very familiar proverb was current among his countrymen,—"Necessitatem in virtutem commutare" (To make necessity a virtue).