is the Devil's workshop"; "The industrious
tortoise wins the race from the lagging eagle"; "When God says,
To-day, the Devil says, To-morrow." In like manner, another cluster
of adages depict the certainty of the detection and punishment of
crime:--"Murder will out"; "Justice has feet of wool, but hands of
iron"; "God's mills grind slow, but they grind sure." So in relation
to every marked exposure of our life, there will be found in the
records of the common thought of mankind a set of deprecating
aphorisms.

The laconic compactness of these utterances, their constant
applicability, the pungent patness with which they hit some fact of
experience, principle of human nature, or phenomenon of life, the ease
with which their racy sense may be apprehended and remembered, give
them a powerful charm for the popular fancy. Accordingly, a multitude
of proverbs are afloat in the writings and in the mouths of every
civilized people. Groups of national proverbs exist in most of the
languages of the world, each family of apothegms revealing the
chief traits of the people who gave them birth. In these collective
expressions of national mind, we can recognize--if so incomplete a
characterization may be ventured--the indrawn meditativeness of the
Hindu, the fiery imagination of the Arab, the devout and prudential
understanding of the Hebrew, the aesthetic subtilty of the Greek,
the legal breadth and sensual recklessness of the Roman, the martial
frenzy of the Goth, the chivalric and dark pride of the Spaniard,
the treacherous blood of the Italian, the mercurial vanity of the
Frenchman, the blunt realism of the Englishman.

It is obvious enough that the masses of moral statements or standing
exhortations composing the aphorisms of a language cannot mix in the
daily minds of men without deep cause and effect. It will be worth our
while to inquire into the bearings of this matter; for, though many a
gatherer has carried his basket through these diamond districts of the
mind, we do not remember that any one has sharply examined the value
of the treasures so often displayed, set forth the methods of their
influence and its qualifications, and determined the respective limits
of their use and their worthlessness. Undertaking this task, we must,
in the outset, divide aphorisms into the two classes of proverbs
and maxims, plebeian perceptions and aristocratic conclusions, moral
axioms and philosophic rules. This distinction may easily be m