recall the somewhat cruel and questionable aphorism of Solomon, currently abbreviated into “Spare the rod and spoil the child.”  When Charles IX. was hesitating as to the enactment of the Saint Bartholomew Massacre, his bigoted mother, infuriated with sectarian hate, whispered in his ear, “Clemency is sometimes cruelty, and cruelty clemency,”—­and the fatal decree was sealed.  But such instances are exceptional, and partly deceptive, too.  Man is usually governed by his own passions, his own circumstances, or his own reason, not by any verbal propositions.  And when an apt and timely adage seems to determine him, it is, for the most part, because it acts upon responsive feelings preexistent in him and already struggling to express themselves.  And thus, upon the whole, it is to be concluded that proverbs are the children of Epimetheus, or afterthought, rather than of Prometheus, or forethought.  They are rather products than producers,—­intellectual forms rather than intellectual forces.  The prevalent notion of their influence is a huge and singular error.  One of our wisest authors, himself a great aphorist, says,—­“Proverbs are the sanctuaries of the intuitions.”  But the intuitions, for the very reason that they are intuitive, need no advisory guidance, and admit of no verbal help.

But when we turn from the aphoristic proverbs of the people to the aphoristic maxims of the wise, a deep distinction and contrast confront us.  These, so far from being evasions of effort or substitutes for thought, are direct stimulants to thought, provocative summonses to more earnest mental application.  Seneca says, “Wouldst thou subject all things to thyself?  Subject thyself to reason.”  A modern writer says, “They are not kings who have thrones, but they who know how to govern.”  Now any one meeting these maxims, if they have any effect on him, will be set a-thinking to discover the principle contained in them.  He will feel that there is a profound significance in them; and his curiosity will be awakened, his intellect fired, to find out the grounds and bearings of the law they denote.  In this way the words of the wise are goads to prick and urge the faculties of inferior minds.  Pointed expressions of the experience of the sovereign masters of life and the world impel feebler and less agile natures to follow the tracks of light and emulate the choice examples set before them, with swifter movements and with richer results than they could ever have attained, if not thus encouraged.  Proverbial axioms flourish copiously in the idiomatic ground and vernacular climate of unlearned, undisciplined, unreflective minds, as thistles on the highway where every ass may gather them.  But precious maxims, those “short sentences drawn from a long experience,” as Cervantes calls them, are found mostly in the writings of the greatest geniuses, Solomon, Aristotle, Shakspeare, Bacon, Goethe, Richter, Emerson:  and they appeal comparatively but to a select class of minds, kindred in some degree to those that originated them.