And first, I would call to your attention the fact that a vast number of its proverbs a people does not make for itself, but finds ready made to its hands: it enters upon them as a part of its intellectual and moral inheritance. The world has now endured so long, and the successive generations of men have thought, felt, enjoyed, suffered, and altogether learned so much, that there is an immense stock of wisdom which may be said to belong to humanity in common, being the gathered fruits of all this its experience in the past. Even Aristotle, more than two thousand years ago, could speak of proverbs as “the fragments of an elder wisdom, which, on account of their brevity and aptness, had amid a general wreck and ruin been preserved.” These, the common property of the civilized world, are the original stock with which each nation starts; these, either orally handed down to it, or made its own by those of its earlier writers who brought it into living communication with the past. Thus, and through these channels, a vast number of Greek, Latin, and medieval proverbs live on with us, and with all the modern nations of the world. [Sidenote: Antiquity of proverbs.] It is, indeed, oftentimes a veritable surprise to discover the venerable age and antiquity of a proverb, which we have hitherto assumed to be quite a later birth of modern society. Thus we may perhaps suppose that well-known word which forbids the too accurate scanning of a present, _One must not look a gift horse in the mouth_, to be of English extraction, the genuine growth of our own soil. I will not pretend to say how old it may be, but it is certainly as old as Jerome, a Latin father of the fourth century; who, when some found fault with certain writings of his, replied with a tartness which he could occasionally exhibit, that they were voluntary on his part, free-will offerings, and with this quoted the proverb, _that it did not behove to look a gift horse in the mouth_; and before it comes to us, we meet it once more in one of the rhymed Latin verses, which were such great favourites in the middle ages: Si quis dat mannos, ne quære in dentibus annos. Again, _Liars should have good memories_ is a saying which probably we assume to be modern; yet it is very far from so being. The same Jerome, who, I may observe by the way, is a very great quoter of proverbs, and who has preserved some that would not otherwise have descended to us,[22] speaks of one as “unmindful of the _old_ proverb, _Liars should have good memories_,”[23] and we find it ourselves in a Latin writer a good deal older than him.[24] So too I was certainly surprised to discover the other day that our own proverb: _Good company on a journey is worth a coach_, has come down to us from the ancient world.[25] [Sidenote: Rhymed Latin proverbs.]