H. A. B.
Trinity College, Cambridge.
Mistletoe (Vol. ii., pp. 163., 214.).—Do I understand your correspondent to ask whether mistletoe is found now except on oaks? The answer is, as at St. Paul's, "Circumspice." Just go into the country a little. The difficulty is generally supposed to be to find it on the oak.
C. B.
UNIVERSALITY OF THE MAXIM, "LAVORA COME SE TU," ETC.
(Vol. iii., p. 188.)
I have not been able to trace this sentence to its source, but it would most probably be found in that admirable book, Monosinii Floris Italicæ Linguæ, 4to, Venet., 1604; or in Torriano's Dictionary of Italian Proverbs and Phrases, folio, Lond., 1666, a book of which Duplessis doubts the existence! Most of Jeremy Taylor's citations from the Italian are proverbial phrases. Your correspondent has probably copied the phrase as it stands in Bohn's edition of the Holy Living and Dying, but there is a trifling variation as it stands in the first edition of Holy Living, 1650:—
"Lavora come se tu havesti a campar ogni hora:
Adora come se tu havesti a morir alhora."