_Traduttori, traditori_; one which we might perhaps reconstitute in English thus: _Translators, traitors_; so untrue, for the most part, are they to the genius of their original, to its spirit, if not to its letter, and frequently to both; so do they _surrender_, rather than _render_, its meaning; not _turning_, but only _overturning_, it from one language to another.[18] A certain pleasant exaggeration, the use of the figure hyperbole, a figure of natural rhetoric which Scripture itself does not disdain to employ, is a not unfrequent engine with the proverb to procure attention, and to make a way for itself into the minds of men. Thus the Persians have a proverb: _A needle’s eye is wide enough for two friends; the whole world is too narrow for two foes_. Again, of a man whose good luck seems never to forsake him, so that from the very things which would be another man’s ruin he extricates himself not merely without harm, but with credit and with gain, the Arabs say: _Fling him into the Nile, and he will come up with a fish in his mouth_; while of such a Fortunatus as this the Germans have a proverb: _If he flung a penny on the roof, a dollar would come down to him_;[19] as, again, of the man in the opposite extreme of fortune, to whom the most unlikely calamities, and such as beforehand might seem to exclude one another, befall, they say: _He would fall on his back, and break his nose_. [Sidenote: Transplanting of proverbs.] In all this which I have just traced out, in the fact that the proverbs of a language are so frequently its highest bloom and flower, while yet so much of their beauty consists often in curious felicities of diction pertaining exclusively to some single language, either in a rapid conciseness to which nothing tantamount exists elsewhere, or in rhymes which it is hard to reproduce, or in alliterations which do not easily find their equivalents, or in other verbal happinesses such as these, lies the difficulty which is often felt, which I shall myself often feel in the course of these lectures, of transferring them without serious loss, nay, sometimes the impossibility of transferring them at all from one language to another.[20] Oftentimes, to use an image of Erasmus,[21] they are like those wines, (I believe the Spanish Valdepeñas is one,) of which the true excellence can only be known by those who drink them in the land which gave them birth. Transport them under other skies, or, which is still more fatal, empty them from vessel to vessel, and their strength and flavour will in great part have disappeared in the process.