The frequent use of aphorisms and proverbial phrases has in all ages been regarded as a vulgarism. Many of them are strikingly true and extremely elegant, having emanated from thoughtful and polished minds; yet in their daily use among writers and speakers of all classes, they become soiled and worn, familiar and profane. They acquire the tone of cant, and are resigned to the possession of those who cannot think and speak for themselves. In the fragments of the old Greek comedy and in others of their familiar writers, we find proverbs usually given up to the subordinate characters. Even in Euripides, 'the philosopher of the scenes,' nearly all whose personages harangue in sententious monostichs like disputants in the Academus or declaimers from the Stoa, the proverbial style is mostly left to messengers and attendants, pedagogues and nurses. Among the Romans, Plautus is most profuse in adages, and with him they drop, thick and fast, from the mouths of pimps and parasites, courtesans, and slaves. Horace employs them seldom, save when personating some humble character; and Cicero, even in his 'Familiar Letters,' often prefaces their introduction by an apologetic 'ut aiunt'--'as they say.' Every one, who has read (and who has _not_ read?) the romance of the renowned Cid Hamet Benengeli, remembers the ludicrous distress suffered by the knight of La Mancha in hearing his squire discharge whole broadsides of rustic proverbs at all times and on all subjects. The Italian language overflows with these trite familiarities. The low characters in the early English comedies, and the old English writers in general, abound in these homely texts, which teach the rustic moralist to _live_. If the novelists of this age of gas and steam-boats place in the mouths of their subaltern heroes few of the thread-bare aphorisms so common in the works of Smollet and Fielding, it is because the 'ignobility' of the present day have arrived at great perfection in a peculiar dialect--a compound of buffoonery and sentiment, of poetry and flash. In place of the quaint proverbs and worn allusions, in which their ancestors couched their humble thoughts, they bedizen their every-day attire of flimsy cant and coarse burlesque with borrowed flowers of fancy and the stolen jewelry of wit.