And proverbs, witty in themselves, often become wittier still in their application, like gems that acquire new brilliancy from their setting, or from some novel light in which they are held. No writer that I know of has an happier skill in thus adding wit to the witty than Fuller, the Church historian. Let me confirm this assertion by one or two examples drawn from his writings. He is describing the indignation, the outcries, the remonstrances, which the thousandfold extortions, the intolerable exactions of the Papal See gave birth to in England during the reigns of such subservient kings as our Third Henry; yet he will not have his readers to suppose that the Popes fared a whit the worse for all this outcry which was raised against them; not so, for _The fox thrives best when he is most cursed_;[113] the very loudness of the clamour was itself rather an evidence how well they were faring. Or again, he is telling of that Duke of Buckingham, well known to us through Shakespeare’s _Richard the Third_, who, having helped the tyrant to a throne, afterwards took mortal displeasure against him; this displeasure he sought to hide, till a season arrived for showing it with effect, in the deep of his heart, but in vain; for, as Fuller observes, _It is hard to halt before a cripple_; the arch-hypocrite Richard, he to whom dissembling was as a second nature, saw through and detected at once the shallow Buckingham’s clumsier deceit. And the _Church History_ abounds with similar happy applications. Fuller, indeed, possesses so much of the wit out of which proverbs spring, that it is not seldom difficult to tell whether he is adducing a proverb, or uttering some proverb-like saying of his own. Thus, I cannot remember ever to have met any of the following, which yet sound like proverbs—the first on solitude as preferable to ill fellowship: _Better ride alone than have a thief’s company_;[114] the second against certain who disparaged one whose excellencies they would have found it very difficult to imitate: _They who complain that Grantham steeple stands awry, will not set a straighter by it_,[115] and in this he warns against despising in any the tokens of honourable toil: _Mock not a cobbler for his black thumbs_.[116] But the glory of proverbs, that, perhaps, which strikes us most often and most forcibly in regard of them, is their shrewd common sense, the sound wisdom for the management of our own lives, and of our intercourse with our fellows, which so many of them contain. In truth, there is no region of practical life which they do not occupy, for which they do not supply some wise hints and counsels and warnings. There is hardly a mistake which in the course of our lives we have committed, but some proverb, had we known and attended to its lesson, might have saved us from it. “Adages,” indeed, according to the more probable etymology of that word, they are, _apt for action_ and use.[117] [Sidenote: Wisdom of silence.]