The antiquity of many of our proverbs is very great, and their parentage is enveloped in mystery. Howell, an old writer on the subject, likens them to "natural children legitimated by prescription and long tract of ancestriall time," and these foundlings have certainly been made very welcome. While the name of the coiner is not transmitted with it, the gift he bestows on posterity enjoys an unending popular appreciation that the authors of soul-stirring appeals, of learned treatises, of exquisite poems, sometimes fail to reach. It is a piece of proverbial wisdom that "liars should have good memories," and there is a very modern ring about it, but St Jerome, writing in the fourth century, introduces it to clinch an argument, and refers to it as an old proverb. Quintilian, a contemporary of Martial, Juvenal, Tacitus, during the reigns of Titus and Domitian, some three hundred years before the days of Jerome, also introduced it. How many centuries before this the proverb was in use, who can say? The rule it lays down would be a valuable one any time this three thousand years or more, and as political economists tell us that supply and demand act and react upon each other, we may reasonably assume that in the earliest ages the demand for such an axiom would give it birth. There is a homely ring in the saying that "He who lies down with dogs will rise up with fleas," and we could well imagine it starting into circulation somewhere about the time of our great-grandfathers, when manners were a little coarser, or at all events, a little more coarsely expressed, and when, without circumlocution, a spade was a spade; but over eighteen centuries ago Seneca quoted this proverb, and we find it in his writings in all its homely directness--"Qui cum canibus concumbunt cum pulicibus surgent." Hesiod introduces many proverbs in his writings, and we find them again referred to by Plutarch, Cicero, and others. When St Paul warned his hearers that "Evil communications corrupt good manners," he was quoting a saying doubtless well known to them. It may be found again in the writings of the poet Menander. In the Edda we meet with many striking Scandinavian proverbs, and one of the books of the Bible, compiled about a thousand years before the Christian era, is wholly devoted to proverbial teaching.