ople, when books were
addressed to scholars; but the people did not find themselves so
destitute of practical wisdom, by preserving their national proverbs, as
some of those closet students who had ceased to repeat them. The various
humours of mankind, in the mutability of human affairs, had given birth
to every species; and men were wise, or merry, or satirical, and mourned
or rejoiced in proverbs. Nations held an universal intercourse of
proverbs, from the eastern to the western world; for we discover among
those which appear strictly national, many which are common to them all.
Of our own familiar ones several may be tracked among the snows of the
Latins and the Greeks, and have sometimes been drawn from "The Mines of
the East:" like decayed families which remain in obscurity, they may
boast of a high lineal descent whenever they recover their lost
title-deeds. The vulgar proverb, "To carry coals to Newcastle," local
and idiomatic as it appears, however, has been borrowed and applied by
ourselves; it may be found among the Persians: in the "Bustan" of Sadi
we have _Infers piper in Hindostan_; "To carry pepper to Hindostan;"
among the Hebrews, "To carry oil to the City of Olives;" a similar
proverb occurs in Greek; and in Galland's "Maxims of the East" we may
discover how many of the most common proverbs among us, as well as some
of Joe Miller's jests, are of oriental origin.

The resemblance of certain proverbs in different nations, must, however,
be often ascribed to the identity of human nature; similar situations
and similar objects have unquestionably made men think and act and
express themselves alike. All nations are parallels of each other! Hence
all paroemiographers, or collectors of proverbs, complain of the
difficulty of separating their own national proverbs from those which
have crept into the language from others, particularly when nations have
held much intercourse together. We have a copious collection of Scottish
proverbs by Kelly, but this learned man was mortified at discovering
that many which he had long believed to have been genuine Scottish, were
not only English, but French, Italian, Spanish, Latin, and Greek ones;
many of his Scottish proverbs are almost literally expressed among the
fragments of remote antiquity. It would have surprised him further had
he been aware that his Greek originals were themselves but copies, and
might have been found in D'Herbelot, Erpenius, and Golius, and in many