Let me adduce another example of the proverbs which have thus grown out of an incident, which contain an allusion to it, and are only perfectly intelligible when the incident itself is known. It is this Spanish: _Let that which is lost be for God_; one the story of whose birth is thus given by the leading Spanish commentator on the proverbs of his nation:—The father of a family, making his will and disposing of his goods upon his death-bed, ordained concerning a certain cow which had strayed, and had been now for a long time missing, that, if it were found, it should be for his children, if otherwise for God: and hence the proverb, _Let that which is lost be for God_, arose. The saying was not one to let die; it laid bare with too fine a skill some of the subtlest treacheries of the human heart; for, indeed, whenever men would give to God only their lame and their blind, that which costs them nothing, that from which they hope no good, no profit, no pleasure for themselves, what are they saying in their hearts but that which this man said openly, _Let that which is lost be for God_. This subject of the generation of proverbs, upon which I have thus touched so slightly, is yet one upon which whole volumes have been written. Those who have occupied themselves herein have sought to trace historically the circumstances out of which various proverbs have sprung, and to which they owe their existence; that so by the analogy of these we might realize to ourselves the rise of others whose origins lie out of our vision, obscure and unknown. No one will deny the interest of the subject: it cannot but be most interesting to preside thus at the birth of a saying which has lived on and held its ground in the world, and has not ceased, from the day it was first uttered, to be more or less of a spiritual or intellectual force among men. Still the cases where this is possible are exceedingly rare, as compared with the far greater number where the first birth is veiled, as is almost all birth, in mystery and obscurity. And indeed it could scarcely be otherwise. The great majority of proverbs are foundlings, the happier foundlings of a nation’s wit, which the collective nation has refused to let perish, has taken up and adopted for its own. But still, as must be expected to be the case with foundlings, they can for the most part give no distinct account of themselves. They make their way, relying on their own merits, not on those of their parents and authors; whom they have forgotten; and who seem equally to have forgotten them, or, at any rate, fail to claim them. Not seldom, too, when a story has been given to account for a proverb’s rise, it must remain a question open to much doubt, whether the story has not been subsequently imagined for the proverb, rather than that the proverb has indeed sprung out of history.[33] * * * * * [Sidenote: Employment of proverbs.]