st the reader
think that the subject is in any wise _infra dignitate_, unworthy, that
is, or undignified. Of the world-renowned Seven Wise Men of Greece, five
at least attained to all their eminence and fame no otherwise than
because they were the cunning framers of maxims and proverbs that
rightly interpreted were calculated to advance and consolidate the moral
and material welfare of the nation around them. Of the remaining two, it
is true that one was an eminent politician and legislator, and the other
a natural philosopher of the first order; but it is questionable if
either of them would have been considered entitled to their prominent
place in the Grecian _Pleiades_ of Wise Men had they not been
proverb-makers and utterers of brief but pregnant "wisdom-words" as
well. Even Solomon, the wisest of men, was less celebrated as a botanist
and naturalist, though he spake of trees, from the cedar that is in
Lebanon, even unto the hyssop that springeth out of the wall; and of
beasts, and of fowls, and of creeping things, and of fishes--less
celebrated even as a lyrist, though his songs were a thousand and five,
than for his proverbs and moral maxims of which the record takes care to
tell us he spake no less than "three thousand." So much then for the
dignity of our subject: what engaged the attention of Solomon and the
Seven Sages of Greece cannot surely be unworthy some small share of our
regard.

"Six and half-a-dozen" is an English phrase, implying either that two
things are exactly the same, or so very much alike as to be practically
the same. The old Gael was not much of an arithmetician, he rarely
meddled with numbers, and therefore no precisely similar phrase is to be
found in his language; but he could express the same idea in his own
way, and so pithily and emphatically that his version of the proverbial
axiom is, perhaps, as good as is to be found in any other language
whatever. The Gael's equivalent for "six and half-a-dozen" is, "_Bo
mhaol odhar, agus bo odhar, mhaol_"--(A cow that is doddled and dun, and
a cow that is dun and doddled)--a phrase drawn, as are many of his most
striking proverbs and prudential maxims, and very naturally too, from
his pastoral surroundings. We recollect an admirable and very ludicrous
application of this saying in a story once told us by the late Dr Norman
Macleod of Glasgow, "old" Norman that is, not the Barony Doctor, but his
father:--When a boy in Morven, of which parish his f