s _Summa Predicantium_ another English version of the verse--

"Wit this betel the smieth
And alle the worle thit wite
That thevt the ungunde alle thing,
And goht him selve a beggyng,"

which shows, I think, the popularity of the verse in the vernacular.
Clearly, then, the Latin version is a translation of this, and not
_vice versa_. It must have been a rhyming formula in the vernacular,
which had a life of its own quite outside its adoption into
literature.

This inferential proof of the actual life of the English rhyming
formula is confirmed by actual facts in the case of the corresponding
German formula. Nork, in the volume I have already quoted, collects
evidence from Grimm, Haupt, and others, which proves that sometimes in
front of a house, as at Osnabrueck, and sometimes at the city gate, as
in several of the cities of Silesia and Saxony, there hangs a mallet
with this inscription:--

"Wer den kindern gibt das Brod
Und selber dabei leidet Noth
Den schlagt mit dieser keule todt"--

which Mr. Thoms has Englished thus:--

"Who to his children gives his bread
And thereby himself suffers need,
With this mallet strike him dead."[105]

These rhymes are the same as those in the Scottish tale and its Latin
analogue, and that they are preserved on the selfsame instrument which
is mentioned in the story as bearing the inscription is proof enough,
I think, that the mallets and their rhyming formulae are far older than
the story. They are not mythical, the story is; their history is
contained in the facts we have above detailed; the life of the
folk-tale commences when the use or formula of the mallet ceases to be
part of the social institutions.

To the rhyming formulae, then, I would trace the rise of the mythic
tale told by the Highland peasant in 1862 to Mr. J. F. Campbell. The
old customs which we have detailed as the true origin of the mallet,
and its hideous use in killing the aged and infirm, had died out, but
the symbol of them remained. To explain the symbol a myth was created,
which kept sufficiently near to the original idea as to retain
evidence of its close connection with the descent of property; and
thus was launched the dateless, impersonal, unlocalised story which
Mr. Campbell has given as a specimen of vagrant traditions, which
"must have been invented after agriculture and fixed habitations,
after laws of property and inheritance; but