And in all this which has been urged lies, as it seems to me, the explanation of a sentence of an ancient grammarian, which at first sight appears to contain a bald absurdity, namely, that a proverb is “a saying without an author.” For, however without a _known_ author it may, and in the majority of cases it must be, still, as we no more believe in the spontaneous generation of proverbs than of anything else, an author every one of them must have had. It might, however, and it often will have been, that in its utterance the author did but _precipitate_ the floating convictions of the society round him; he did but clothe in happier form what others had already felt, or even already uttered; for often a proverb has been in this aspect, “the wit of one, and the wisdom of many.” And further, its constitutive element, as we must all now perceive, is not the utterance on the part of the one, but the acceptance on the part of the many. It is _their_ sanction which first makes it to be such; so that every one who took or gave it during the period when it was struggling into recognition may claim to have had a share in its production; and in this sense without any single author it may have been. From the very first the people will have vindicated it for their own. And thus though they do not always analyse the compliment paid to them in the use of their proverbs, they always feel it; they feel that a writer or speaker using these is putting himself on their ground, is entering on their region, and they welcome him the more cordially for this.[11] * * * * * [Sidenote: Not all proverbs figurative.] Let us now consider if some other have not sometimes been proposed as essential notes of the proverb, which yet are in fact accidents, such as may be present or absent without affecting it vitally. Into an error of this kind they have fallen, who have claimed for the proverb, and made it one of its necessary conditions, that it should be a figurative expression. A moment’s consideration will be sufficient to disprove this. How many proverbs, such as _Haste makes waste_;—_Honesty is the best policy_, with ten thousand more, have nothing figurative about them. Here again the error has arisen from taking that which belongs certainly to very many proverbs, and those oftentimes the best and choicest, and transferring it, as a necessary condition, to all. This much of truth they who made the assertion certainly had; namely, that the employment of the concrete instead of the abstract is one of the most frequent means by which it obtains and keeps its popularity; for so the proverb makes its appeal to the whole man—not to the intellectual faculties alone, but to the feelings, to the fancy, or even to the imagination, as well, stirring the whole man to pleasurable activity.