A recent number of Chambers’s Papers for the People also contains an article on Defoe, in which the same lines are quoted as having since grown into a proverb. It is evident that the two critics believed the idea to be original with Defoe. But they were both in error; for in an old tract, entitled The Vineyarde of Vertue, printed in 1591, seventy-seven years before Defoe was born, may be found the following sentence:—
It is oftentimes seene, that as God hath his Churche, so will the Deuill have a Chappell.
It was also used before Defoe’s time by George Herbert and Robert Burton. The former says, in his Jacula Prudentum, “No sooner is a temple built to God, but the Devil builds a chapel hard by;” and the latter, in his Anatomy of Melancholy, thus expresses it: “Where God hath a Temple the Devil will have a Chapel.” It is evident that Defoe only versified a well-known proverb of his day.
THE USE OF LANGUAGE.
To Talleyrand has generally been attributed the authorship of the maxim that “the use of language is to conceal our thoughts.” (La parole a été donnée à l’homme pour aider à cacher sa pensée.)
In Pycroft’s Ways and Words of Men of Letters, a quotation is made from an article on The Use of Language, published in a periodical called the Bee, under date of October 20, 1759, which reads as follows: “He who best knows how to conceal his necessity and desires is the most likely person to find redress; and the true use of speech is not so much to express our wants as to conceal them.”
Nearly a century before this, Dr. South preached a sermon in Westminster Abbey, on The Wisdom of the World, in which he said, “Men speak with designs of mischief, and therefore they speak in the dark. In short, this seems to be the true inward judgment of all our politic sages, that speech was given to the ordinary sort of men whereby to communicate their mind, but to wise men whereby to conceal it.”
SCANDINAVIAN SKULL CUPS.
What a pretty tale was slaughtered when Grenville Piggot pointed out, in his Manual of Scandinavian Mythology, the blundering translation of the passage in an old Scandinavian poem relating to the occupation of the blest in the halls of Valhalla, the Northern paradise! “Soon shall we drink out of the curved horns of the head,” are the words in the death-song of Regner Lodbrog; meaning by this violent figure to say that they would imbibe their liquor out of cups formed from the crooked horns of animals. The first translators, however, not seeing their way clearly, rendered the passage, “Soon shall we drink out of the skulls of our enemies;” and to this strange banqueting there are allusions without end to be met with in our literature. Peter Pindar, for example, once said that the booksellers, like the heroes of Valhalla, drank their wine out of the skulls of authors.