C. W. G.
"When the maggot bites" (Vol. viii., p 244.).—An Anon correspondent asks for a note to explain the origin of the saying that thing done on the spur of the moment is done "when the maggot bites." Perhaps the best explanation is that afforded in the following passage from Swift's Discourse on the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit:
"It is the opinion of choice virtuosi that the brain is only a crowd of little animals with teeth and claws extremely sharp, and which cling together in the contexture we behold, like the picture of Hobbes's Leviathan; or like bees in perpendicular swarm on a tree; or like a carrion corrupted into vermin, still preserving the shape and figure of the mother animal: that all invention is formed by the morsure of two or more of these animals upon certain capillary nerves which proceed from thence, whereof three branches spring into the tongue and two into the right hand. They hold also that these animals are of a constitution extremely cold: that their food is the air we attract, their excrement phlegm. And that what we vulgarly call rheums, and colds, and distillations, is nothing else but an epidemical looseness to which that little commonwealth is very subject from the climate it lies under. Farther, that nothing less than a violent heat can disentangle these creatures from their hamated station in life; or give them vigour and humour, to imprint the marks of their little teeth. That if the morsure be hexagonal, it produces poetry; the circular gives eloquence. If the bite hath been conical, the person whose nerve is so affected shall be disposed to write upon politics; and so of the rest."
J. Emerson Tennent.
Definition of a Proverb (Vol. viii., p. 242.).—The proverb, "Wit of one man, the wisdom of many," has been attributed to Lord John Russell: I think in a recent number of the Quarterly Review. The foundation was laid most probably by Bacon:
"The genius, wit, and spirit of a nation are discovered by their proverbs."
It may not be perhaps generally known to your readers, that in a small volume, called Origines de la Lengua Espanola, &c., por Don Gregorio Mayans y Siscar, Bibliothecario del Rei nuestro Señor, en Madrid, Año 1737, will be found a numerous collection of Spanish proverbs. A MS. note in my copy has a note, stating that the MS. made for Mayans, from the original, in the national library at Madrid, is now in the British Museum, Additional MSS., No. 9939.
The work is divided into dialogues; and in the copy in question are some remarks by a Spanish gentleman, I fear too long for your pages: but I send you an English version by a friend, of one of the couplets in the dialogues, "Diez marcos tengo de oro:"
"Ten marks of gold for the telling,
And of silver I have nine score,