Synesius, a Christian writer of the early part of the fifth century, affirms, in quoting from a work of Aristotle that is now lost, that "A proverb is a remnant of the ancient philosophy preserved amid many destructions on account of its brevity and fitness for use," and in like strain Agricola declares proverbs to be "short sentences into which, as in rules, the ancients have compressed life." Cervantes puts this yet more pithily in his definition, "Short sentences drawn from long experience." Howell, too, is happy in his declaration, "Sayings which combine sense, shortness, and salt." Russell declares a proverb to be "the wisdom of many and the wit of one"--the one being the man who puts into happy form a truth that many had already felt, and thereby crystallised it for the use of all future time. Bacon, less happily, declares proverbs to be "the genius, wit, and spirit of a nation"; but this definition manifestly covers a far wider area than can be justly claimed for them. We need scarcely here point out that the word spirit does not mean the courage and resolution that summon a nation to the defence of its rights. It is but the Anglicised form of the French _esprit_, a word that has no entirely satisfactory English equivalent. Chambers hath it that "proverbs are pithy, practical, popular sayings, expressive of certain more or less general convictions," and this is a definition that really seems to cover very satisfactorily the whole ground. That of Annandale is like unto it, "A proverb is a short and pithy sentence forming a popular saying, and expressing some result of the experience of life in a keen, quaint, and lively fashion." Popularity is an essential feature, an absolute necessity. A saying of some wise man may strike us at once as one of the happiest of utterances, but if from any cause it does not find acceptance and adoption into the common speech, the absence of this popular recognition of its work debars it. It may richly deserve a place amongst the proverbs, being as pithy, as wise as any of them, and possess every essential of a proverb save the one. This one essential of general acceptance being wanting, we have left to us a golden sentence, a striking aphorism, a soul-stirring utterance. This is a point that some of the compilers of lists of proverbs have overlooked, and they have been tempted to insert in their pages brilliant wisdom-chips from the writings of divers clever men, or to coin them for themselves. Worcester, in his dictionary, defines a proverb as "a common or pithy expression which embodies some moral precept or admitted truth," but we find in practice that some few of these popular sayings are not altogether moral in their teaching. Hazlitt affirms that this popular diction is "an expression or combination of words conveying a truth to the mind by a figure, periphrasis, antithesis, or hyperbole." Here, again, the soundness of the teaching is taken for granted.