m the heights of antiquity; it is clothed with
a kind of authority. Doubtless many a poor boy has received a sound
flogging which he would have escaped, had not his father happened
to recall the somewhat cruel and questionable aphorism of Solomon,
currently abbreviated into "Spare the rod and spoil the child."
When Charles IX. was hesitating as to the enactment of the Saint
Bartholomew Massacre, his bigoted mother, infuriated with sectarian
hate, whispered in his ear, "Clemency is sometimes cruelty, and
cruelty clemency,"--and the fatal decree was sealed. But such
instances are exceptional, and partly deceptive, too. Man is usually
governed by his own passions, his own circumstances, or his own
reason, not by any verbal propositions. And when an apt and timely
adage seems to determine him, it is, for the most part, because
it acts upon responsive feelings preexistent in him and already
struggling to express themselves. And thus, upon the whole, it is
to be concluded that proverbs are the children of Epimetheus, or
afterthought, rather than of Prometheus, or forethought. They are
rather products than producers,--intellectual forms rather than
intellectual forces. The prevalent notion of their influence is a
huge and singular error. One of our wisest authors, himself a great
aphorist, says,--"Proverbs are the sanctuaries of the intuitions." But
the intuitions, for the very reason that they are intuitive, need no
advisory guidance, and admit of no verbal help.

But when we turn from the aphoristic proverbs of the people to
the aphoristic maxims of the wise, a deep distinction and contrast
confront us. These, so far from being evasions of effort or
substitutes for thought, are direct stimulants to thought, provocative
summonses to more earnest mental application. Seneca says, "Wouldst
thou subject all things to thyself? Subject thyself to reason." A
modern writer says, "They are not kings who have thrones, but they who
know how to govern." Now any one meeting these maxims, if they have
any effect on him, will be set a-thinking to discover the principle
contained in them. He will feel that there is a profound significance
in them; and his curiosity will be awakened, his intellect fired, to
find out the grounds and bearings of the law they denote. In this way
the words of the wise are goads to prick and urge the faculties of
inferior minds. Pointed expressions of the experience of the sovereign
masters of life and the world