While we find a striking similarity existing between the proverbs of various peoples, many being absolutely identical, and others teaching the same truths under somewhat different external guise; there is also in many cases a certain local and individual colouring that gives added interest. We see, too, national idiosyncrasies coming to the front in the greater prominence given to proverbs having a bearing in some particular direction. Thus, a poetic and imaginative people will specially dwell on proverbs of a picturesque and refined type, while a thrifty and cautious race will hold in especial esteem the inculcation of saving, of early rising, of steady labour, the avoidance of debt and suretyship. A more impulsive people will care but little for such thraldom, and will teach in its sayings the delights of the present, the pursuit of the pleasures rather than the duties of life, and the wild doctrine of revenge against those who thwart their desires; while an oppressed and downtrodden race will very faithfully reflect the oppression under which they lie by the sayings that find most favour amongst them. Our English proverbs, like our language, have come to us from many sources; and while we have some little store that we may claim as of home-growth, the greater part has been judiciously borrowed. We may fairly ascribe to our changeable climate such a warning adage as the advice to "Make hay while the sun shines"; and when a settler on the prairies of the West clothes the excellent doctrine that every man for himself should perform the disagreeable tasks that come in his way, and not seek to transfer them to other people, in the formula, "Every man must skin his own skunk," we feel the sentiment to be redolent of the soil of its birth. The picture it presents to us is so entirely American that it is quite needless to search for its origin in the folk-lore of Wessex or on the banks of the Indus.[91:A] The greater number of the proverbs of ancient Greece were fraught with allusions to the mythology, poetry, and national history of Hellas, and thus form a valuable testimony to the general high level of intellectual training of this wonderful people. The "Adagia" of Erasmus contains, as the result of the search of many years amongst the literary remains of the classical authors, some five thousand of these ancient sayings. Many that, from their Latin dress we ascribe to the Romans, were really derived from Greek or still earlier sources.