Let me mention now a few other of the more frequent helps which the proverb employs for obtaining currency among men, for being listened to with pleasure by them, for not slipping again from their memories who have once heard it;—yet helps which are evidently so separable from it, that none can be in danger of affirming them essential parts or conditions of it. Of these rhyme is the most prominent. It would lead me altogether from my immediate argument, were I to enter into a disquisition on the causes of the charm which rhyme has for us all; but that it does possess a wondrous charm, that we _like_ what is _like_, is attested by a thousand facts, and not least by the circumstance that into this rhyming form a very great multitude of proverbs, and those among the most widely current, have been thrown. Though such will probably at once be present to the minds of all, yet let me mention a few: _Good mind, good find_;—_Wide will wear, but tight will tear_;—_Truth may be blamed, but cannot be shamed_;—_Little strokes fell great oaks_;—_Women’s jars breed men’s wars_;—_A king’s face should give grace_;—_East, west, home is best_;—_Store is no sore_;—_Slow help is no help_;—_Who goes a-borrowing, goes a-sorrowing_;—with many more, uniting, as you will observe several of them do, this of rhyme with that which I have spoken of before, namely, extreme brevity and conciseness.[16] [Sidenote: Alliteration in proverbs.] Alliteration, which is nearly allied to rhyme, is another of the helps whereof the proverb largely avails itself. Alliteration was at one time an important element in our early English versification; it almost promised to contend with rhyme itself, which should be the most important; and perhaps, if some great master in the art had arisen, might have retained a far greater hold on English poetry than it now possesses. At present it is merely secondary and subsidiary. Yet it cannot be called altogether unimportant; no master of melody despises it; on the contrary, the greatest, as in our days Tennyson, make the most frequent, though not always the most obvious, use of it. In the proverb you will find it of continual recurrence, and where it falls, as, to be worth anything, it must, on the key-words of the sentence, of very high value. Thus: _Frost and fraud both end in foul_;—_Like lips, like lettuce_;—_Meal and matins minish no way_;—_Who swims in sin, shall sink in sorrow_;—_No cross, no crown_;—_Out of debt, out of danger_;—_Do in hill as you would do in hall_;[17] that is, Be in solitude the same that you would be in a crowd. I will not detain you with further examples of this in other languages; but such occur, and in such numbers that it seems idle to quote them, in all; I will only adduce, in concluding this branch of the subject, a single Italian proverb, which in a remarkable manner unites all three qualities of which we have been last treating, brevity, rhyme, and alliteration: