The poets have been very busy with proverbs in all the languages of Europe: some appear to have been the favourite lines of some ancient poem: even in more refined times, many of the pointed verses of Boileau and Pope have become proverbial. Many trivial and laconic proverbs bear the jingle of alliteration or rhyme, which assisted their circulation, and were probably struck off extempore; a manner which Swift practised, who was a ready coiner of such rhyming and ludicrous proverbs: delighting to startle a collector by his facetious or sarcastic humour, in the shape of an "old saying and true." Some of these rhyming proverbs are, however, terse and elegant: we have Little strokes Fell great oaks. The Italian-- _Chi duo lepri caccia Uno perde, e l'altro lascia._ Who hunts two hares, loses one and leaves the other. The haughty Spaniard-- _El dar es honor, Y el pedir dolor._ To give is honour, to ask is grief. And the French-- _Ami de table Est variable._ The friend of the table Is very variable. The composers of these short proverbs were a numerous race of poets, who, probably, among the dreams of their immortality never suspected that they were to descend to posterity, themselves and their works unknown, while their extempore thoughts would be repeated by their own nation. Proverbs were at length consigned to the people, when books were addressed to scholars; but the people did not find themselves so destitute of practical wisdom, by preserving their national proverbs, as some of those closet students who had ceased to repeat them. The various humours of mankind, in the mutability of human affairs, had given birth to every species; and men were wise, or merry, or satirical, and mourned or rejoiced in proverbs. Nations held an universal intercourse of proverbs, from the eastern to the western world; for we discover among those which appear strictly national, many which are common to them all. Of our own familiar ones several may be tracked among the snows of the Latins and the Greeks, and have sometimes been drawn from "The Mines of the East:" like decayed families which remain in obscurity, they may boast of a high lineal descent whenever they recover their lost title-deeds. The vulgar proverb, "To carry coals to Newcastle," local and idiomatic as it appears, however, has been borrowed and applied by ourselves; it may be found among the Persians: in the "Bustan" of Sadi we have _Infers piper in Hindostan_; "To carry pepper to Hindostan;" among the Hebrews, "To carry oil to the City of Olives;" a similar proverb occurs in Greek; and in Galland's "Maxims of the East" we may discover how many of the most common proverbs among us, as well as some of Joe Miller's jests, are of oriental origin.