But while it must be freely owned that the charges brought just now against the Italian proverbs are sufficiently borne out by too many, they are not all to be included in the common shame. Very many there are not merely of a delicate refinement of beauty, as this, expressive of the freedom in regard of _thine_ and _mine_ which will exist between true friends: _Friends tie their purses with a spider’s thread_;[60] of a subtle wisdom which has not degenerated into cunning and deceit; but also of a nobler stamp; honour and honesty, plain dealing and uprightness, have here their praises too, and are not seldom pronounced to be in the end more than a match for all cunning and deceit. How excellent in this sense is the following: _For an honest man half his wits is enough, the whole are too little for a knave_;[61] the ways, that is, of truth and uprightness are so simple and plain, that a little wit is abundantly sufficient for those that walk in them; the ways of falsehood and fraud are so perplexed and tangled, that sooner or later all the wit of the cleverest rogue will not preserve him from being entangled therein. How often and how wonderfully has this found its confirmation in the lives of evil men; so true it is, to employ another proverb and a very deep one from the same quarter, that _The devil is subtle, yet weaves a coarse web_.[62] Again, what description of Egypt as it now is, or indeed generally of the East, could set us at the heart of its moral condition, could make us to understand all which long centuries of oppression and misrule have made of it and of its people, what could do this so effectually as the collection of Arabic proverbs now current in Egypt, which the traveller Burckhardt gathered, and which, after his death, were published with his name?[63] In other books, others describe the modern Egyptians, but here they unconsciously describe themselves. The selfishness, the utter extinction of all public spirit, the servility, which no longer as with an inward shame creeps into men’s acts, but utters itself boldly as the avowed law of their lives, the sense of the oppression of the strong, of the insecurity of the weak, and, generally, the whole character of life, alike outward and inward, as poor, mean, sordid, and ignoble, with only a few faintest glimpses of that romance which one usually attaches to the East; all this, as we study these documents, rises up before us in truest, though in painfullest, outline.