Spaniard’s contempt for his peninsular neighbours finds its emphatic utterance in another: _Take from a Spaniard all his good qualities, and there remains a Portuguese_. We may too, I think, remark how a nation will occasionally in its proverbs indulge in a fine irony upon itself, and show that it is perfectly aware of its own weaknesses, follies, and faults. This the Spaniards must be allowed to do in their proverb, _Succours of Spain, either late, or never_.[52] However largely and confidently promised, these _succours of Spain_ either do not arrive at all, or only arrive after the opportunity in which they could have served have passed away. Certainly any one who reads the despatches of England’s Great Captain during the Peninsular War will find in almost every page of them that which abundantly justifies this proverb, will own that those who made it read themselves aright, and could not have designated broken pledges, unfulfilled promises of aid, tardy and thus ineffectual assistance, by an happier title than _Succours of Spain_. And then again what a fearful glimpse of those blood feuds which, having once begun, seem as if they could never end, blood touching blood, and violence evermore provoking its like, have we in the following: _Kill, and thou shalt be killed, and they shall kill him who kills thee_.[53] The Italians also are eminently rich in proverbs; and yet if ever I have been tempted to retract or seriously to modify what I shall have occasion by-and-bye to affirm in regard of a nobler life and spirit as predominating in proverbs, it has been after the study of some Italian collection. “The Italian proverbs,” it has been said not without too much reason, though perhaps also with overmuch severity, “have taken a tinge from their deep and politic genius, and their wisdom seems wholly concentrated in their personal interests. I think every tenth proverb in an Italian collection is some cynical or some selfish maxim, a book of the world for worldlings.”[54] Certainly many of them are shrewd enough, and only too shrewd; “ungracious,” inculcating an universal suspicion, teaching to look everywhere for a foe, to expect, as the Greeks said, a scorpion under every stone, glorifying artifice and cunning as the true guides and only safe leaders through the perplexed labyrinth of life,[55] and altogether seeming dictated as by the very spirit of Machiavel himself. [Sidenote: Proverbs on revenge.]