Note 191 — LECTURE VI. THE THEOLOGY OF PROVERBS.

The deepening of a proverb’s use among Christian nations as compared with earlier applications of the same may be illustrated by an example, which however, as not being directly theological, and thus not bearing immediately upon the matter in hand, I shall prefer to append in a note. An old Greek and Latin proverb, A great city, a great solitude, (Magna civitas, magna solitudo,) seems to have dwelt merely on the outside of things, and to have meant no more than this, namely, that a city ambitiously laid out and upon a large scheme would with difficulty find inhabitants sufficient, would wear an appearance of emptiness and desolation; as there used to be a jest about Washington, that strangers would sometimes imagine themselves deep in the woods, when indeed they were in the centre of the city. But with deeper cravings of the human heart after love and affection, the proverb was claimed in an higher sense. We may take in proof these striking words of De Quincey, which are the more striking that neither they nor the context contain any direct reference to the proverb: “No man,” he says, “ever was left to himself for the first time in the streets, as yet unknown, of London, but he must have felt saddened and mortified, perhaps terrified, by the sense of desertion and utter loneliness which belongs to his situation. No loneliness can be like that which weighs upon the heart in the centre of faces never ending, without voice or utterance for him; eyes innumerable that have ‘no speculation’ in their orbs which he can understand; and hurrying figures of men and women weaving to and fro, with no apparent purposes intelligible to a stranger, seeming like a masque of maniacs, or a pageant of shadowy illusions.” A direct reference to the proverb is to be found in some affecting words of Lord Bacon, who glosses and explains it exactly in this sense;—“For a crowd is not company, and faces are but a gallery of pictures, and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love.”