theory, and must leave the skilful student to the delicacy of the practice. I am anxious to rescue from prevailing prejudices these neglected stores of curious amusement, and of deep insight into the ways of man, and to point out the bold and concealed truths which are scattered in these collections. There seems to be no occurrence in human affairs to which some proverb may not be applied. All knowledge was long aphoristical and traditional, pithily contracting the discoveries which were to be instantly comprehended and easily retained. Whatever be the revolutionary state of man, similar principles and like occurrences are returning on us; and antiquity, whenever it is justly applicable to our times, loses its denomination, and becomes the truth of our own age. A proverb will often cut the knot which others in vain are attempting to untie. Johnson, palled with the redundant elegancies of modern composition, once said, "I fancy mankind may come in time to write all aphoristically, except in narrative; grow weary of preparation, and connexion, and illustration, and all those arts by which a big book is made." Many a volume indeed has often been written to demonstrate what a lover of proverbs could show had long been ascertained by a single one in his favourite collections.

An insurmountable difficulty, which every paræmiographer has encountered, is that of forming an apt, a ready, and a systematic classification: the moral Linnæus of such a 'systema naturæ" has not yet appeared. Each discovered his predecessor's mode imperfect, but each was doomed to meet the same fate.* The arrangement of proverbs has baffled the ingenuity of every one of their collectors. Our Ray, after long premeditation, has chosen a system with the appearance of an alphabetical order; but, as it turns out, his system is no system, and his alphabet is no alphabet. After ten years' labour, the good man could only arrange his proverbs by commonplaces-by complete sentences-by phrases or forms of speech-by proverbial similes—and so on. All these are pursued in alphabetical order, "by the first

Since the appearance of the present article, several collections of PROVERBS have been attempted. A little unpretending volume, entitled "Select Proverbs of all Nations, with Notes and Comments, by Thomas Fielding, 1824," is not ill arranged; an excellent book for popular reading. The editor of a recent miscellaneous compilation, "The Treasury of Knowledge," has whimsically bordered the four sides of the pages of a Dictionary with as many proverbs. The plan was ingenious, but the proverbs are not. Triteness and triviality are fatal to a proverb.

letter of the most 'material word,' or if there be more words 'equally material,' by that which usually stands foremost.' The most patient examiner will usually find that he wants the sagacity of the collector to discover that word which is "the most material," or, "the words equally material.". We have to search through all that multiplicity of divisions, or conjuring boxes, in which this juggler of proverbs pretends to hide the ball.*

A still more formidable objection against a collection of proverbs, for the impatient reader, is their unreadableness. Taking in succession a multitude of insulated proverbs, their slippery nature resists all hope of retaining one in a hundred; the study of proverbs must be a frequent recurrence to a gradual collection of favourite ones, which we ourselves must form. The experience of life will throw a perpetual freshness over these short and simple texts; every day may furnish a new commentary; and we may grow old, and find novelty in proverbs by their perpetual application.

:

There are, perhaps, about twenty thousand proverbs among the nations of Europe: many of these have spread in their common intercourse; many are borrowed from the ancients, chiefly the Greeks, who themselves largely took them from the eastern nations. Our own proverbs are too often deficient in that elegance and ingenuity which are often found in the Spanish and the Italian. Proverbs frequently enliven conversation, or enter into the business of life in those countries, without any feeling of vulgarity being associated with them they are too numerous, too witty, and too wise to cease to please by their poignancy and their aptitude. I have heard them fall from the lips of men of letters and of statesmen. When recently the disorderly state of the manufacturers of Manchester menaced an insurrection, a profound Italian politician observed to me, that it was not of a nature to alarm a great nation; for that the remedy was at hand, in the proverb of the Lazzaroni of Naples, Metà consiglio, metà esempio, metà denaro ! "Half advice, half example, half money!" The result confirmed the truth of the proverb, which, had it been known at the time, might have quieted the honest fears of a great part of the nation.

Proverbs have ceased to be studied or employed in con

A new edition of Ray's book, with large additions, was published by Bohn, in 1855, under the title of "A Handbook of Proverbs." It is a vast collection of "wise saws" of all ages and countries.

versation since the time we have derived our knowledge from books; but in a philosophical age they appear to offer infinite subjects for speculative curiosity. Originating in various eras, these memorials of manners, of events, and of modes of thinking, for historical as well as for moral purposes, still retain a strong hold on our attention. The collected knowledge of successive ages, and of different people, must always enter into some part of our own! Truth and nature can never be obsolete.

Proverbs embrace the wide sphere of human existence, they take all the colours of life, they are often exquisite strokes of genius, they delight by their airy sarcasm or their caustic satire, the luxuriance of their humour, the playfulness of their turn, and even by the elegance of their imagery, and the tenderness of their sentiment. They give a deep insight into domestic life, and open for us the heart of man, in all the various states which he may occupy-a frequent review of proverbs should enter into our readings; and although they are no longer the ornaments of conversation, they have not ceased to be the treasuries of Thought!

CONFUSION OF WORDS.

"THERE is nothing more common," says the lively Voltaire, "than to read and to converse to no purpose. In history, in morals, in law, in physic, and in divinity, be careful of equivocal terms." One of the ancients wrote a book to prove that there was no word which did not convey an ambiguous and uncertain meaning. If we possessed this lost book, our ingenious dictionaries of "synonyms" would not probably prove its uselessness. Whenever the same word is associated by the parties with different ideas, they may converse, or controverse, till "the crack of doom!" This with a little obstinacy and some agility in shifting his ground, makes the fortune of an opponent. While one party is worried in disentangling a meaning, and the other is winding and unwinding about him with another, a word of the kind we have mentioned, carelessly or perversely slipped into an argument, may prolong it for a century or two-as it has happened! Vaugelas, who passed his whole life in the study of words, would not allow that the sense was to determine the meaning of words; for, says he, it is the business of words to explain

VOL. III.

F

the sense. Kant for a long while discovered in this way a facility of arguing without end, as at this moment do our political economists. "I beseech you," exclaims a poetical critic, in the agony of a confusion of words, on the Pope controversy, "not to ask whether I mean this or that!" Our critic, positive that he has made himself understood, has shown how a few vague terms may admit of volumes of vindication. Throw out a word, capable of fifty senses, and you raise fifty parties! Should some friend of peace enable the fifty to repose on one sense, that innocent word, no longer ringing the tocsin of a party, would lie in forgetfulness in the Dictionary. Still more provoking when an identity of meaning is only disguised by different modes of expression, and when the term has been closely sifted, to their mutual astonishment both parties discover the same thing lying under the bran and chaff after this heated operation. Plato and Aristotle probably agreed much better than the opposite parties they raised up imagined; their difference was in the manner of expression, rather than in the points discussed. The Nominalists and the Realists, who once filled the world with their brawls, and who from irregular words came to regular blows, could never comprehend their alternate nonsense; whether in employing general terms we use words or names only, or whether there is in nature anything corresponding to what we mean by a general idea?" The Nominalists only denied what no one in his senses would affirm and the Realists only contended for what no one in his senses would deny; a hair's breadth might have joined what the spirit of party had sundered!

;

Do we flatter ourselves that the Logomachies of the Nominalists and the Realists terminated with these scolding schoolmen? Modern nonsense, weighed against the obsolete, may make the scales tremble for awhile, but it will lose its agreeable quality of freshness, and subside into an equipoise. We find their spirit still lurking among our own metaphysicians! Lo! the Nominalists and the Realists again!" exclaimed my learned friend, Sharon Turner, alluding to our modern doctrines on abstract ideas, on which there is still a doubt whether they are anything more than generalising terms. Leibnitz confused his philosophy by the term sufficient reason: for every existence, for every event, and for

*Turner's "History of England," i. 514.

This vague

every truth there must be a sufficient reason.
ness of language produced a perpetual misconception, and
Leibnitz was proud of his equivocal triumphs in always
affording a new interpretation! It is conjectured that he
only employed his term of sufficient reason for the plain
simple word of cause. Even Locke, who has himself so ad-
mirably noticed the "abuse of words," has been charged with
using vague and indefinite ones; he has sometimes employed
the words reflection, mind, and spirit in so indefinite a way,
that they have confused his philosophy: thus by some ambi-
guous expressions, our great metaphysician has been made to
establish doctrines fatal to the immutability of moral distinc-
tions. Even the eagle-eye of the intellectual Newton grew
dim in the obscurity of the language of Locke. We are
astonished to discover that two such intellects should not
comprehend the same ideas; for Newton wrote to Locke, "I
beg your pardon for representing that you struck at the root
of morality in a principle laid down in your book of Ideas—
and that I took you for a Hobbist!''* The difference of
opinion between Locke and Reid is in consequence of an am-
biguity in the word principle, as employed by Reid. The
removal of a solitary word may cast a luminous ray over a
whole body of philosophy: "If we had called the infinite the
indefinite," says Condillac, in his Traité des Sensations, "by
this small change of a word we should have avoided the error
of imagining that we have a positive idea of infinity, from
whence so many false reasonings have been carried on, not
only by metaphysicians, but even by geometricians." The
word reason has been used with different meanings by diffe-
rent writers; reasoning and reason have been often con-
founded; a man may have an endless capacity for reasoning,
without being much influenced by reason, and to be reason-
able, perhaps differs from both! So Molière tells us,

Raisonner est l'emploi de toute ma maison;
Et le raisonnement en bannit la raison !

In this research on "confusion of words," might enter the voluminous history of the founders of sects, who have usually employed terms which had no meaning attached to them, or were so ambiguous that their real notions have never been comprehended; hence the most chimerical opinions have been

* We owe this curious unpublished letter to the zeal and care of Professor Dugald Stewart, in his excellent "Dissertations."