e Edda, "the sublime
speech of Odin," abounds with ancient proverbs, strikingly descriptive
of the ancient Scandinavians. Undoubtedly proverbs in the earliest ages
long served as the unwritten language of morality, and even of the
useful arts; like the oral traditions of the Jews, they floated down
from age to age on the lips of successive generations. The name of the
first sage who sanctioned the saying would in time be forgotten, while
the opinion, the metaphor, or the expression, remained, consecrated into
a proverb! Such was the origin of those memorable sentences by which men
learnt to think and to speak appositely; they were precepts which no man
could contradict, at a time when authority was valued more than opinion,
and experience preferred to novelty. The proverbs of a father became the
inheritance of a son; the mistress of a family perpetuated hers through
her household; the workman condensed some traditional secret of his
craft into a proverbial expression. When countries are not yet populous,
and property has not yet produced great inequalities in its ranks, every
day will show them how "the drunkard and the glutton come to poverty,
and drowsiness clothes a man with rags." At such a period he who gave
counsel gave wealth.

It might therefore have been decided, _a priori_, that the most homely
proverbs would abound in the most ancient writers--and such we find in
Hesiod; a poet whose learning was not drawn from books. It could only
have been in the agricultural state that this venerable bard could have
indicated a state of repose by this rustic proverb:--

[Greek: Pedalion men uper kapnou katadeio]
Hang your plough-beam o'er the hearth!

The envy of rival workmen is as justly described by a reference to the
humble manufacturers of earthenware as by the elevated jealousies of the
literati and the artists of a more polished age. The famous proverbial
verse in Hesiod's Works and Days--

[Greek: Kai kerameus keramei koteei],

is literally, "The potter is hostile to the potter!"

The admonition of the poet to his brother, to prefer a friendly
accommodation to a litigious lawsuit, has fixed a paradoxical proverb
often applied,--

[Greek: Pleon emisu pantos],
The half is better than the whole!

In the progress of time, the stock of popular proverbs received
accessions from the highest sources of human intelligence; as the
philosophers of antiquity formed their collections, they increased in
"wei