Or to take another example still more to the point. James Howell, a prolific English writer of the earlier half of the seventeenth century, one certainly meriting better than that almost entire oblivion into which his writings have fallen, occupied himself much with proverbs; and besides collecting those of others, he has himself set down “five hundred new sayings, which in tract of time may serve for proverbs to posterity.” As was to be expected, they have not so done; for it is not after this artificial method that such are born; yet many of these proverbs in expectation are expressed with sense and felicity; for example: “Pride is a flower that grows in the devil’s garden;” as again, the selfishness which characterizes too many proverbs is not ill reproduced in the following: “Burn not thy fingers to snuff another man’s candle;” and there is at any rate good theology in the following: “Faith is a great lady, and good works are her attendants;” and in this: “The poor are God’s receivers, and the angels are his auditors.” Yet for all this, it would be inaccurate to quote these as proverbs, (and their author himself, as we have seen, did not do more than set them out as proverbs upon trial,) inasmuch as they have remained the private property of him who first devised them, never having passed into general circulation; which until men’s sayings have done, maxims, sentences, apothegms, aphorisms they may be, and these of excellent temper and proof, but proverbs as yet they are not. [Sidenote: Not all proverbs true.]