Of the same miscellaneous character, and derived from quarters the most diverse, but all of them of an excellent sense or shrewdness, are the following. This is from Italy: _Who sees not the bottom, let him not pass the water_.[129] This is current among the free blacks of Hayti: _Before fording the river, do not curse Mrs. Alligator_;[130] provoke not wantonly those in whose power you presently may be. This is Spanish: _Call me not “olive,” till you see me gathered_;[131] being nearly parallel to our own: _Praise a fair day at night_; and this French: _Take the first advice of a woman, and not the second_;[132] a proverb of much wisdom; for in processes of reasoning, out of which the second counsels would spring, women may and will be, inferior to us; but in intuitions, in moral intuitions above all, they surpass us far; they have what Montaigne ascribes to them in a remarkable word, “l’esprit _primesautier_,” the leopard’s spring, which takes its prey, if it be to take it at all, at the first bound. And I cannot but think that for as many as are seeking diligently to improve their time and opportunities of knowledge, with at the same time little of either which they can call their own, a very useful hint and warning against an error which lies very near, is contained in the little Latin proverb: _Compendia, dispendia_. Nor indeed for them only, but for all, and in numberless respects it often proves true that a short cut may be a very long way home; yet the proverb can never be applied better than to those little catechisms of science, those skeleton outlines of history, those epitomes of all useful information, those thousand delusive short cuts to the attainment of that knowledge, which can indeed only be acquired by them that are content to travel on the king’s highway, on the old, and as I must still call it, the royal road of patience, perseverance, and toil. Surely these _compendia_, so meagre and so hungry, with little food for the intellect, with less for the affections, we may style with fullest right _dispendia_, wasteful as they generally prove of whatever time and labour and money is bestowed upon them; and every wise man will set his seal to this word, as wisely as it is grandly spoken: “All spacious minds, attended with the felicities of means and leisure, will fly abridgements as bane.” [Sidenote: Proverbs about books.]