in distinction, are results of reflection.  They are experience generalized into rules for the guidance of action, as, “Think twice before you speak once,” or, “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.”  Proverbs are statical; maxims are dynamic.  Those are wisdom embalmed; these wisdom vitalized.  The former are literary fodder; the latter are literary pemmican.

The commonest application of proverbs is as mental economics, substitutes for thought.  They are constantly employed by the ordinary sort of persons as provisions to avoid spiritual exertion, artifices to dispose of a matter with the smallest amount of intellectual trouble, as when one ends a controversy with the adage, “Least said, soonest mended.”  The majority of people desire to get along with the least possible expenditure of thinking.  To many a hard-headed laborer, five minutes of girded and continuous thinking are more exhaustive than a whole day of muscular toil.  No fact is more familiar than that illiterate minds are furnished with an abundance of trite sayings which they readily cite on all occasions.  They thus hit, or at least fancy they hit, the principle which applies to the exigency, without the trouble of extemporaneously thinking it out for themselves on the spot.  Such saws as, “The pot must not call the kettle black,” “One swallow does not make a Spring,” “Nought is never in danger,” “Out of sight, out of mind,” often give employment to an otherwise freightless tongue, and serve as excusing makeshifts for a mind incompetent, from ignorance, indolence, or fatigue, to discharge the duty of furnishing its own thought and expression for the occasion.

Proverbs are more frequently used as explanations than as guides of conduct, as the reason why we have acted in a certain manner than as a reason why we should act so.  “Look before you leap,” is usually said after we have leaped.  When a miserly man refuses to give anything in behalf of some distant object, his refusal is not prompted by the remembrance of the proverb, “Charity begins at home”; but the stingy propensity first stirs in the man and actuates him, and then he expresses his motive, or evades the true issue, by quoting the selfish old saw ever ready at his hand.  In such cases the axiom is not the forerunning cause of the action, but its justifying explanation.  Sometimes, undeniably, an applicable proverb coming to mind does influence a man and decide his conduct.  Coming at the right moment, in the wavering of his will, it suggests the principle which determines him, lends the needful balance of impulse for which he waited.  An old proverb, indorsed by the usage of generations, strikes on the ear like a voice falling from 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