Sometimes a proverb, without changing its shape altogether, will yet on the lips of different nations be slightly modified; and these modifications, slight as often they are, may not the less be eminently characteristic. Thus in English we say, _The river past, and God forgotten_, to express with how mournful a frequency He whose assistance was invoked, it may have been earnestly, in the moment of peril, is remembered no more, so soon as by his help the danger has been surmounted. The Spaniards have the proverb too; but it is with them: _The river past, the saint forgotten_,[87] the saints being in Spain more prominent objects of invocation than God. And the Italian form of it sounds a still sadder depth of ingratitude: _The peril past, the saint mocked_;[88] the vows made to him in peril remaining unperformed in safety; and he treated something as, in Greek story, Juno was treated by Mandrabulus the Samian; who, having under her auspices and through her direction discovered a gold mine, in his instant gratitude vowed to her a golden ram; which he presently exchanged in intention for a silver one; and again this for a very small brass one; and this for nothing at all; the rapidly descending scale of whose gratitude, with the entire disappearance of his thank-offering, might very profitably live in our memories, as so perhaps it would be less likely to repeat itself in our lives. Footnotes [37] The writer might have added, the superstitions; for proverbs not a few involve and rest on popular superstitions, and a collection of these would be curious and in many ways instructive. Such, for instance, is the Latin, (it is, indeed, also Greek): _A serpent, unless it devour a serpent, grows not to a dragon_; (Serpens, nisi serpentem comederit, non fit draco); which Lord Bacon moralizes so shrewdly: “The folly of one man is the fortune of another; for no man prospers so suddenly as by other men’s errors.” Such again is the old German proverb: _The night is no man’s friend_; (Die Nacht ist keines Menschen Freund;) which rests, as Grimm has so truly observed (_Deutsche Mythol._, p. 713) on the wide-spread feeling in the northern mythologies, of the night as an unfriendly and, indeed, hostile power to man. And such, too, the French: _A Sunday’s child dies never of the plague_; (Qui nait le dimanche, jamais ne meurt de peste.) [38] We may adduce further the words of Salmasius: Argutæ hæ brevesque loquendi formulæ suas habent veneres, et genium cujusque gentis penes quam celebrantur, atque acumen ostendunt. [39] Thus Ἄϊδoς κυνῆ—Ἄπληστος πίθος.—Ἰλιὰς κακῶν. [40] This Greek proverb on love is the noblest of the kind which I remember: Μουσικὴν ἔρως διδάσκει, κἄντις ἄμουσος ᾖ τὸ πρίν.