Note 37 — LECTURE III. THE PROVERBS OF DIFFERENT NATIONS COMPARED.

The writer might have added, the superstitions; for proverbs not a few involve and rest on popular superstitions, and a collection of these would be curious and in many ways instructive. Such, for instance, is the Latin, (it is, indeed, also Greek): A serpent, unless it devour a serpent, grows not to a dragon; (Serpens, nisi serpentem comederit, non fit draco); which Lord Bacon moralizes so shrewdly: “The folly of one man is the fortune of another; for no man prospers so suddenly as by other men’s errors.” Such again is the old German proverb: The night is no man’s friend; (Die Nacht ist keines Menschen Freund;) which rests, as Grimm has so truly observed (Deutsche Mythol., p. 713) on the wide-spread feeling in the northern mythologies, of the night as an unfriendly and, indeed, hostile power to man. And such, too, the French: A Sunday’s child dies never of the plague; (Qui nait le dimanche, jamais ne meurt de peste.)