Having lighted just now on one of those Latin rhymed verses, let me by the way guard against an error about them, into which it would be very easy to fall. I have seen it suggested that these, if not the source _from_ which, are yet the channels _by_ which, a great many proverbs have reached us. I should greatly doubt it. This much we may conclude from the existence of proverbs in this shape, namely, that since these rhymed or leonine verses went altogether out of fashion at the revival of a classical taste in the fifteenth century, such proverbs as are found in this form may be affirmed with a tolerable certainty to date at least as far back as that period; but not that in all or even in a majority of cases, this shape was their earliest. Oftentime the proverb in its more popular form is so greatly superior to the same in this its Latin monkish dress, that the latter by its tameness and flatness betrays itself at once as the inadequate translation, and we cannot fail to regard the other as the genuine proverb. Many of them are “so essentially Teutonic, that they frequently appear to great disadvantage in the Latin garb which has been huddled upon them.”[26] Thus, when we have on one side the English, _Hungry bellies have no ears_, and on the other the Latin, Jejunus venter non audit verba libenter, who can doubt that the first is the proverb, and the second only its versification? Or who would hesitate to affirm that the old Greek proverb, _A rolling stone gathers no moss_, may very well have come to us without the intervention of the medieval Latin, Non fit hirsutus lapis hinc atque inde volutus? And the true state of the case comes out still more clearly, where there are _two_ of these rhymed Latin equivalents for the one popular proverb, and these quite independent of each other. So it is in respect of our English proverb: _A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush_; which appears in this form: Una avis in dextrâ melior quam quatuor extra; and also in this: Capta avis est pluris quam mille in gramine ruris. Who can fail to see here two independent attempts to render the same saying? Sometimes the Latin line confesses itself to be only the rendering of a popular word; thus is it with the following: _Ut dicunt multi, cito transit lancea stulti_; in other words: _A fool’s bolt is soon shot_.