And, as in that last example, so not seldom will there be an evident superiority of a proverb in one language over one, which however resembles it closely in another. Moving in the same sphere, it will yet be richer, fuller, deeper. Thus our own, _A burnt child fears the fire_, is good; but that of many tongues, _A scalded dog fears cold water_, is better still. Ours does but express that those who have suffered once will henceforward be timid in respect of that same thing from which they have suffered; but that other the tendency to exaggerate such fears, so that now they shall fear even where no fear is. And the fact that so it will be, clothes itself in an almost infinite variety of forms. Thus one Italian proverb says: _A dog which has been beaten with a stick, is afraid of its shadow_; and another, which could only have had its birth in the sunny South, where the glancing but harmless lizard so often darts across your path: _Whom a serpent has bitten a lizard alarms_.[86] With a little variation from this, the Jewish Rabbis had said long before: _One bitten by a serpent, is afraid of a rope’s end_; even that which bears so remote a resemblance to a serpent as this does, shall now inspire him with terror; and the Cingalese, still expressing the same thought, but with imagery borrowed from their own tropic clime: _The man who has received a beating from a firebrand, runs away at sight of a firefly_. [Sidenote: Rabbinical proverb.] Some of our Lord’s sayings contain the same lessons which the proverbs of the Jewish Rabbis contained already; for He was willing to bring forth even from his treasury things old as well as new; but it is very instructive to observe how they acquire in his mouth a dignity and decorum which, it may be, they wanted before. We are all familiar with that word in the Sermon on the Mount, “Whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain.” The Rabbis had a proverb to match, lively and piquant enough, but certainly lacking the gravity of this, and which never could have fallen from the same lips: _If thy neighbour call thee ass, put a packsaddle on thy back_; do not, that is, withdraw thyself from the wrong, but rather go forward to meet it. But thus, in least as in greatest, it was His to make all things new. [Sidenote: Progress of ingratitude.]