Still this is rather the case, where we seek deliberately, and only in a literary interest, to translate some proverb which we admire from its native language into our own or another. Where, on the contrary, _it has transferred itself_, made for itself a second home, and taken root a second time in the heart and affections of a people, in such a case one is continually surprised at the instinctive skill with which it has found compensations for that which it has been compelled to let go; it is impossible not to admire the unconscious skill with which it has replaced one vigorous idiom by another, one happy rhyme or play on words by its equivalent; and all this even in those cases where the extremely narrow limits in which it must confine itself allow it the very smallest liberty of selection. And thus, presenting itself equally finished and complete in two or even more languages, the internal evidence will be quite insufficient to determine which of its forms we shall regard as the original, and which as a copy. For example, the proverb at once German and French, which I can present in no comelier English dress than this, Mother’s truth Keeps constant youth; but which in German runs thus, _Mutter-treu Wird täglich neu_; and in French, _Tendresse maternelle Toujours se renouvelle_; appears to me as exquisitely graceful and tender in the one language as in the other; while yet so much of its beauty depends on the form, that beforehand one could hardly have expected that the charm of it would have survived its transfer to the second language, whichever that may be, wherein it found an home. Having thus opened the subject, I shall reserve its further development for the lectures which follow. Footnotes [1] A similar contempt of them speaks out in the antithesis of the French Jesuit, Bouhours: Les proverbes sont les sentences du peuple, et les sentences sont les proverbes des honnêtes gens. [2] Compare with this Martial’s so happy epigram upon epigrams, in which everything runs exactly parallel to that which has been said above: “Omne epigramma sit instar apis; sit aculeus illi, Sint sua mella, sit et corporis exigui;” which may be indifferently rendered thus: “Three things must epigrams, like bees, have all— Its sting, its honey, and its body small.” [3] The very shortest proverb which I know in the world is this German: Voll, toll; which sets out very well the connexion between fulness and folly, pride and abundance of bread. In that seeking of extreme brevity noted above, they sometimes become exceedingly elliptical, (although this is the case more with the ancient than with the modern,) so much so as to omit even the vital element of the sentence, the verb. Thus: Χρήματ’ ἀνήρ;—Sus Minervam;—Fures clamorem;—Meretrix pudicam;—Amantes amentes. [4] This is what Aristotle means when he ascribes συντομία—which in another place he opposes to the ὄγκος λέξεως—to it.