l knowledge was long aphoristical and traditional, pithily
contracting the discoveries which were to be instantly comprehended and
easily retained. Whatever be the revolutionary state of man, similar
principles and like occurrences are returning on us; and antiquity,
whenever it is justly applicable to our times, loses its denomination,
and becomes the truth of our own age. A proverb will often cut the knot
which others in vain are attempting to untie. Johnson, palled with the
redundant elegancies of modern composition, once said, "I fancy mankind
may come in time to write all aphoristically, except in narrative; grow
weary of preparation, and connexion, and illustration, and all those
arts by which a big book is made." Many a volume indeed has often been
written to demonstrate what a lover of proverbs could show had long been
ascertained by a single one in his favourite collections.

An insurmountable difficulty, which every paraemiographer has
encountered, is that of forming an apt, a ready, and a systematic
classification: the moral Linnaeus of such a "systema naturae" has not yet
appeared. Each discovered his predecessor's mode imperfect, but each was
doomed to meet the same fate.[40] The arrangement of proverbs has
baffled the ingenuity of every one of their collectors. Our Ray, after
long premeditation, has chosen a system with the appearance of an
alphabetical order; but, as it turns out, his system is no system, and
his alphabet is no alphabet. After ten years' labour, the good man could
only arrange his proverbs by commonplaces--by complete sentences--by
phrases or forms of speech--by proverbial similes--and so on. All these
are pursued in alphabetical order, "by the first letter of the most
'material word,' or if there be more words '_equally material_,' by that
which usually stands foremost." The most patient examiner will usually
find that he wants the sagacity of the collector to discover that word
which is "the most material," or, "the words equally material." We have
to search through all that multiplicity of divisions, or conjuring
boxes, in which this juggler of proverbs pretends to hide the ball.[41]

A still more formidable objection against a collection of proverbs, for
the impatient reader, is their unreadableness. Taking in succession a
multitude of insulated proverbs, their slippery nature resists all hope
of retaining one in a hundred; the study of proverbs must be a frequent
recurrence to a grad