Proverbs, old as they are, seem always new, and are always smartly uttered. Sancho Panza is but one of an immortal type, and the proverbs and maxims he was always using are older than the pyramids--as old as spoken language. "The language of Spain," says Bulwer, in Caxtoniana, "is essentially a language of proverbs. In proverbs, lovers woo; in proverbs, politicians argue; in proverbs, you make your bargain with your landlady or hold a conference with your muleteer. The language of Spain is built upon those diminutive relics of a wisdom that may have existed before the Deluge, as the town of Berlin is built upon strata amassed, in the process of ages, by the animalcules that dwell in their pores." Aristotle was so struck by the condensed wisdom of proverbial sayings, that he supposed them to be the wrecks of an ancient philosophy saved from the ruin in which the rest of the system had been lost by their eloquence and shortness. Pascal conceived that every possible maxim of conduct existed in the world, though no individual can be conversant with the entire series. "There is a certain list of vices committed in all ages, and declaimed against by all authors, which," says Sir Thomas Browne, "will last as long as human nature; which, digested into commonplaces, may serve for any theme, and never be out of date until doomsday." A proverb Lord John Russell has defined to be "the wisdom of the many in the wit of one." "The various humors of mankind," says the elder Disraeli, "in the mutability of human affairs, has 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 Saadi, we have 'To carry pepper to Hindostan;' among the Hebrews, 'To carry oil to a 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. The resemblance of certain proverbs in different nations must, however, be often ascribed to the identity of human nature; similar situations and similar objects have unquestionably made men think and act and express themselves alike. All nations are parallels of each other. Hence all collectors of proverbs complain of the difficulty of separating their own national proverbs from those