_Gold of Toulouse_[31] is another of these proverbs in which men’s sense of a God verily ruling and judging the earth has found its embodiment. The Consul Q. S. Cæpio had taken the city of Toulouse by an act of more than common perfidy and treachery; and possessed himself of the immense hoards of wealth stored in the temples of the Gaulish deities. From this day forth he was so hunted by calamity, all extremest evils and disasters, all shame and dishonour, fell so thick on himself and all who were his, and were so traced up by the moral instinct of mankind to this accursed thing which he had made his own, that any wicked gains, fatal to their possessor, acquired this name; and of such a one it would be said “He has gold of Toulouse.” Another proverb, which in English has run into the following posy, _There’s many a slip ’twixt the cup and the lip_, descends to us from the Greeks, having a very striking story connected with it: A master treated with extreme cruelty his slaves who were occupied in planting and otherwise laying out a vineyard for him; until at length one of them, the most misused, prophesied that for this his cruelty he should never drink of its wine. When the first vintage was completed, he bade this slave to fill a goblet for him, which taking in his hand he at the same time taunted him with the non-fulfilment of his prophecy. The other replied with words which have since become proverbial: as he spake, tidings were hastily brought of a huge wild boar that was wasting the vineyard. Setting down the untasted cup, the master went out to meet the wild boar, and was slain in the encounter, and thus the proverb, _Many things find place between the cup and lip_, arose.[32] A Scotch proverb, _He that invented the Maiden, first hanselled it_, is not altogether unworthy to rank with these. It alludes to the well-known historic fact that the Regent Morton, the inventor of a new instrument of death called “The Maiden,” was himself the first upon whom the proof of it was made. Men felt, to use the language of the Latin poet, that “no law was juster than that the artificers of death should perish by their own art,” and embodied their sense of this in the proverb. [Sidenote: Gnomes become proverbs.]