esh and as ingenious as any of our patent inventions.

By the title of the present article the reader has anticipated the
nature of the old furniture to which I allude. I propose to give what,
in the style of our times, may be called the Philosophy of Proverbs--a
topic which seems virgin. The art of reading proverbs has not, indeed,
always been acquired even by some of their admirers; but my
observations, like their subject, must be versatile and unconnected; and
I must bespeak indulgence for an attempt to illustrate a very curious
branch of literature, rather not understood than quite forgotten.

Proverbs have long been in disuse. "A man of fashion," observes Lord
Chesterfield, "never has recourse to proverbs and vulgar aphorisms;"
and, since the time his lordship so solemnly interdicted their use, they
appear to have withered away under the ban of his anathema. His lordship
was little conversant with the history of proverbs, and would
unquestionably have smiled on those "men of fashion" of another stamp,
who, in the days of Elizabeth, James, and Charles, were great collectors
of them; would appeal to them in their conversations, and enforce them
in their learned or their statesmanlike correspondence. Few, perhaps,
even now, suspect that these neglected fragments of wisdom, which exist
among all nations, still offer many interesting objects for the studies
of the philosopher and the historian; and for men of the world still
open an extensive school of human life and manners.

The home-spun adages, and the rusty "sayed-saws," which remain in the
mouths of the people, are adapted to their capacities and their humours.
Easily remembered, and readily applied, these are the philosophy of the
vulgar, and often more sound than that of their masters! whoever would
learn what the people think, and how they feel, must not reject even
these as insignificant. The proverbs of the street and of the market,
true to nature, and lasting only because they are true, are records that
the populace at Athens and at Rome were the same people as at Paris and
at London, and as they had before been in the city of Jerusalem!

Proverbs existed before books. The Spaniards date the origin of their
_refranes que dicen las viejas tras el fuego_, "sayings of old wives by
their firesides," before the existence of any writings in their
language, from the circumstance that these are in the old romance or
rudest vulgar idiom. The most ancient poem in th