fashion, at one time so popular; but to anyone whose delight is the
reading of good books as opposed to modern novels, there can be no more
interesting amusement.

It can be a risky thing, however, this commonplacing, and he would be a
bold man who dared to assign unto any one writer a popular phrase for no
other reason than that this one has first expressed it in writing. There
is no new thing under the sun, and by continued expression a familiar
maxim becomes at last a proverb. Ask at a dinner-table who first wrote
'God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb.' The knowing ones will puzzle
their brains in silence; some lady with religious tendencies will claim
it for the Holy Writ, inclining towards Isaiah; but the quiet bookish man
at the end of the table will smile in a superior way, and offer to wager
that he can name the author. You may safely accept his bet, for it is a
hundred pounds to a penny that he will proclaim Laurence Sterne to have
written it--he may even quote the context. Granted that Sterne did write
it, but Sterne was a widely-read man and a plagiarist of no mean ability.
So you may ask the bookish man how he doth account for this saying
occurring in that quaint collection of 'Outlandish Proverbs' entitled
'Jacula Prudentum,' by Master George Herbert, compiled _from ancient
sources_ full a hundred years before the birth of the 'Sentimental
Journey.'[18]

Sometimes in ancient literature one comes across an expression which is
in the vocabulary of everybody to-day, and one realises how very ancient
some of these popular aphorisms must be. 'It is not alle golde that
glareth,' wrote Chaucer, and the same theme was sung in Provencal by
Amanieu des Escas near a hundred years before. But, like 'A bird in the
hand,' it is so applicable to the failings to which mankind is prone,
that its origin must surely have been far beyond even the classics of the
old world, back in the dim ages of man's history. Common also to all
nations must some at least of these primitive sayings be, for there is a
primaeval simplicity about them that knows nothing of race or
civilisation. 'A soft answer turns away wrath,' 'Pride goes before a
fall,' 'Spare the rod and spoil the child,' are not all these and many
others, collected by King Solomon from the wisdom of the East, as
applicable to our everyday life in this age as they have ever been in the
whole history of mankind?[19] Enough of moralising, however; or else,
convinced of the f