[Gutenberg 56504] • Proverbs and Their Lessons / Being the Subject of Lectures Delivered to Young Men's / Societies at Portsmouth and Elsewhere

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1857 edition. Excerpt: ... but only because I must needs hasten onward, that I leave this part of my subject without further development. What a fine knowledge of the human heart will they often display. I know not whether this Persian saying on the subtleties of pride is a proverb in the very strictest sense of the word, but it is forcibly uttered: Thou shalt sooner detect an ant moving in the dark night on the black earth, than all the motions of pride in thine heart. And on the wide reach of this sin the Italians say: If pride were as art, how many graduates we should have; and how excellent and searching is this word of theirs on the infinitely various shapes which this protean sin will assume: There are who despise pride with a greater pride, f one which might almost seem to have been founded on the story of Diogenes, who, treading under his feet a rich carpet of Plato's, exclaimed, "Thus I trample on the ostentation of Plato;" 'With an ostentation of thine own/ was the other's excellent retort;--even as on another occasion he observed, with admirable wit, that he saw the pride of the Cynic peeping through the rents of his mantle: for indeed pride can array itself quite as easily in rags as in purple; can affect squalors as earnestly as splendours; the lowest place and the last is of itself no security at all for humility; and out of a sense of this we very well have said: As proud go behind as before. Se la superbia fosse arte, quanti Dottori avressimo. f Tal sprezza la superbia con una maggior superbia. Sometimes in their subtle observation of life, they arrive at conclusions which we would very willingly question or reject, but to which it is impossible to refuse a certain amount of assent. Thus it is with the very striking German proverb: One foe...