"Saturday change, and Sunday full,
Never did good, nor never wull."
For the peasant in his rude fashion is a meteorologist and has studied the ways of the clouds, "water wagons," as in some counties he calls them. From him Aratus might have filled another Diosemeia, and Virgil improved his first Greorgic. Our Elizabethan dramatists have borrowed some of their most life-like touches from the peasant's weather-lore. Thus Cunningham, in Beaumont and Fletcher's Wit at Several Weapons, says of wrangling:
"It never comes but, like a storm of hail,
'Tis sure to bring fine weather in the tail on't."
Act. iii., Sc. 1.
And Webster, borrowing from the sailor, makes Silvio say of the cardinal that he
"Lifts up hit nose like a fool porpoise before storm."
Duchess of Malfy, Act, iii., Sc. 3.
Shakespeare borrows from both peasant and sailor. His finest descriptions of cloud scenery, as we shall show, are based upon popular phrases. Two of his most beautiful similes illustrate the villager's weather lore. Thus Lucrece is described:
"And round about her tear-distrained eye.
Blue circles streamed like rainbows in the sky.
Those water-galls in her dim element,
Foretell new storms to those already spent."
And again, in All's Well that Ends Well, the countess says to Helena:
"What's the matter
That this distempered messenger of wet,
The many-colored Iris, rounds thine eye?"
Act. i., Sc. 3.
And the peasant's rhymes and sayings undoubtedly contain some germs of truth, or they could never have so long held their ground. Admiral Fitzroy, in his "Weather Book," has rightly given a collection of such saws, though it might with advantage be greatly enlarged. Science has before now been forestalled by some bold guess of the vulgar. And often has some happy intuition outstripped the slow labor of the inductive process.