What a fine knowledge of the human heart will they often display. I know not whether this Persian saying on the subtleties of pride is a proverb in the very strictest sense of the word, but it is forcibly uttered: _Thou shalt sooner detect an ant moving in the dark night on the black earth, than all the motions of pride in thine heart_. And on the wide reach of this sin the Italians say: _If pride were as art, how many graduates we should have_;[107] and how excellent and searching is this word of theirs on the infinitely various shapes which this protean sin will assume: _There are who despise pride with a greater pride_,[108] one which might almost seem to have been founded on the story of Diogenes, who, treading under his feet a rich carpet of Plato’s, exclaimed, “Thus I trample on the ostentation of Plato;” ‘With an ostentation of thine own,’ was the other’s excellent retort;—even as on another occasion he observed, with admirable wit, that he saw the pride of the Cynic peeping through the rents of his mantle: for indeed pride can array itself quite as easily in rags as in purple; can affect squalors as earnestly as splendours; the lowest place and the last is of itself no security at all for humility; and out of a sense of this _we_ very well have said: _As proud go behind as before_. Sometimes in their subtle observation of life, they arrive at conclusions which we would very willingly question or reject, but to which it is impossible to refuse a certain amount of assent. Thus it is with the very striking German proverb: _One foe is too many; and an hundred friends too few_.[109] There speaks out in this a sense of how much more _active_ a principle in this world will hate be sometimes than love. The hundred friends will _wish_ you well; but the one foe will _do_ you ill. Their benevolence will be ordinarily passive; his malevolence will be constantly active; it will be _animosity_, or spiritedness in evil. The proverb will have its use, if we are stirred up by it to prove its assertion false, to show that, in very many cases at least, there is no such blot as it would set on the scutcheon of true friendship. In the same rank of unwelcome proverbs I must range this Persian one: _Of four things every man has more than he knows: of sins, of debts, of years, and of foes_; and this Spanish: _One father can support ten children; ten children cannot support one father_; which, in so far as it rests upon a certain ground of truth, suggests a painful reflection in regard of the less strength which there must be in the filial than in the paternal affection, since to the one those acts of self-sacrificing love are easy, which to the other are hard, and often impossible. But yet, seeing that it is the order of God’s providence in the world that fathers should in all cases support children, while it is the exception when children are called to support parents, one can only admire that wisdom which has made the instincts