NATIONAL.

There is hardly a nation in ancient or modern days whose language can be learned without meeting with new proverbs. Some countries are particularly fertile in them. I should name among the foremost Scotland and Italy. The English language is well supplied, but, in many instances, they appear to have been adopted, and the originals of them are to be found elsewhere. I propose in the present chapter, to bring forward some that show National Characteristics, taking the lion's share of space for Great Britain and Ireland.

English Counties shall lead the way;

Berkshire is blunt, as might be expected in the Vale of the White Horse,

There be more ways of killing a cat than by choking of him with

cream!

In the neighbouring Surrey, is a saying suggestive of the extreme beauty of its hill and woodland scenery, In and out like a Surrey lane:

while the town of Dorking of good poultry association, supplies its spirited Rifle Corps with the denomination, of The Five Claws.'

The true arms of Surrey to have and to hold

Are the famed warren chequers of blue and of gold.

6

Nottingham has immortalised its wise men of Gotham'; they seem to have been of the same calibre with those three tailors of Tooley Street, who began their famous petition,

'We, the people of England!'

Lincolnshire, with its long, low, harbourless coast, not inappropriately suggests,

Any port in a storm:

while one of its small towns has no less than two traditions.

O Grantham, Grantham! these wonders are thine,

A lofty steeple, and a living sign!

A swarm of bees was once the sign of an inn at the entrance.

The other is a reputation hardly as complimentary.

Grantham gruel, nine grits and a gallon of water!

Rich Kent takes a fling at less highly favoured districts.

A knight of Cales!

A gentleman of Wales,

And a laird of the North Countrie,—

A yeoman of Kent,

With his yearly rent

Will buy them up all three !

"Neither in Kent nor in Christendom.'

Blessed is the Eye

Between Severn and Wye.

is another local saying that may be abundantly verified.

Essex stiles,
Kentish miles,

And Norfolk wiles

Many men beguiles.

in which latter instance, the requirements of rhyme seem to have proved too strong for the

When Bredon hill wears a hat

grammar.

Men of the vale, mind that!--Worcestershire.

Yorkshire at once supplies us with a touch of the canny North.

I'se Yorkshire too!

is the exclamation, when

E

or, as we say,

Greek meets Greek;

When Diamond cuts diamond.

A 'Yorkshire tyke'

is not to be easily taken in.

What Lancashire thinks to-day, all England thinks to-morrow.— Sir R. Peel.

And again, what contemptuous vigour is there in the North Country expression,

Two stomachs for the meat and none for the work.

It must have been for a character of this kind that the 'Warning of Scarbro' was originated.

A word and a blow, and the blow first!

Though this has been always the Good Old Times way of proceeding,

Castigatque, auditque Rhadamanthus.

First hang and draw,

Then try the cause by Lidford law.

Lidford is a parish which contains the greater part of Dartmoor, a rough wild district, which once had laws of its own.

'Jedburgh justice'

had much the same meaning.

There was a rough kind of justice in this when the evil doer was taken red handed; but there is no such excuse for the law of the strongest,

The ancient rule, the good old plan,

That he should take who has the power,
And he should keep-who can.

'Lynch law,' however, seems to have got even beyond 'Jedburg law,' if we may go by the American Judge, in the horse stealing case; who, in his charge to the 'jury, asked them to make haste, because the room would be soon wanted for laying out the body!'

is the toast in which Shropshire celebrates that noble feature of her country.

No ending like a Devonshire lane.

Devonshire is said to have this also, among other more important characteristics, that they call everything there 'he,' except a Tom cat, which is invariably 'she.'

Blow the wind high, or blow it low

It bloweth good to Hawley's Hoe.- Plymouth. Cornwall contributes

By Tre, Poll, and Pen

You shall know the Cornish men ;

and again, describing the results of a schoal of pilchards coming into one of their bays.

Meat, money, and light

All in one night

He that will not be ruled by the rudder must be ruled by the rock. while again Wales,

'As long as a Welsh pedigree';

which Walter Scott in one of his couplets, thus strikingly illustrates.

Sir David ap Morgan, ap Griffith, ap Hugh,

Ap Tudor, ap Rhice, quoth his roundelay;

Hur's a gentleman, God wot, and hur's lineage is of Wales, And where is the lady could say him nay?

There is said to be a kind of tradition in Wales that the first man's name was really Adam Jones, only the Janes, somehow or other, fell into disuse.

'Not guilty' said the Welsh jury but not to do it again!' which is only to be equalled by that barbarous English jury of husbands. 'Guilty,' they brought him in, but sarved her right!'

Proceeding now to Great Britain and Ireland, the

special national characteristics have been thus sarcastically stated.

When food is short,

The Englishman weeps,

The Irishman sleeps,

And the Scotchman gangs till he gets it.

An Englishman's never happy but when he's miserable, A Scotchman's never at home but when he's abroad, An Irishman's never at peace but when he's fighting: with regard to which Cumberland's epigram may be quoted,

Had Cain been a Scot, Heaven had altered his doom,
Not forced him to rove, but confined him at home.

A question is also said to have been asked of men of the three Nationalities, the answers to which are no less characteristic,

'What will you take to stand without your coat in the rain for an hour ?'

Englishman I'll take a pound,

Scotchman

Irishman

What will ye gie me?

Faix, and I'll take a very bad could!

Among foreign nations there is one proverb of this same fashion; which has lately met with the most marvellous exemplification.

The Italians are wise before the deed,
The Germans are wise in the deed,

The French are wise after the deed.

Scotch proverbs will be met with, scattered up and down, through the whole of these chapters: it may suffice therefore to give some few here as examples.

Drive a cow to the byre, and she'll run to the ha.

The Spanish say,

Set a frog on a golden stool,

And off he hops, again, to the pool.

and the French