bly from some jocular tenure observed on St. Bernard's
day, pay a tribute of peaches to the court of Tuscany, which are usually
shared among the ladies in waiting, and the pages of the court. It
happened one season, in a great scarcity of peaches, that the good
people of Poggibonsi, finding them rather dear, sent, instead of the
customary tribute, a quantity of fine juicy figs, which was so much
disapproved of by the pages, that as soon as they got hold of them, they
began in rage to empty the baskets on the heads of the ambassadors of
the Poggibonsi, who, in attempting to fly as well as they could from the
pulpy shower, half-blinded, and recollecting that peaches would have
had stones in them, cried out--

_Per beato ch' elle non furon pesche!_
Luckily they were not peaches!

_Fare le scalee di Sant' Ambrogio_; "To mount the stairs of Saint
Ambrose," a proverb allusive to the business of the school of scandal.
Varchi explains it by a circumstance so common in provincial cities. On
summer evenings, for fresh air and gossip, the loungers met on the steps
and landing-places of the church of St. Ambrose: whoever left the party,
"they read in his book," as our commentator expresses it; and not a leaf
was passed over! All liked to join a party so well informed of one
another's concerns, and every one tried to be the very last to quit
it,--not "to leave his character behind!" It became a proverbial phrase
with those who left a company, and were too tender of their backs, to
request they would not "mount the stairs of St. Ambrose." Jonson has
well described such a company:

You are so truly fear'd, but not beloved
One of another, as no one dares break
Company from the rest, lest they should fall
Upon him absent.

There are legends and histories which belong to proverbs; and some of
the most ancient refer to incidents which have not always been
commemorated. Two Greek proverbs have accidentally been explained by
Pausanias: "He is a man of Tenedos!" to describe a person of
unquestionable veracity; and "To cut with the Tenedian axe;" to express
an absolute and irrevocable refusal. The first originated in a king of
Tenedos, who decreed that there should always stand behind the judge a
man holding an axe, ready to execute justice on any one convicted of
falsehood. The other arose from the same king, whose father having
reached his island, to supplicate the son's forgiveness for the injury
inflicted on him by the a