It may be as well to state, that the lectures which are here published
were never delivered as a complete course, but only one here and two
there, as matter gradually grew under my hands; yet so that very much
the greater part of what is contained in this volume has been at one
time or another actually delivered. Although I have always taken a
lively interest in national proverbs, I had no intention at the first
of making a book about them; but only selected the subject as one
which I thought, though I was not confident of this, might afford
me sufficient material for a single lecture, which I had undertaken
some time ago to deliver. I confess that I was at the time almost
entirely ignorant of the immense number and variety of books bearing
on the subject. Many of these I still know only by name. With some of
the best, however, I have made myself acquainted, and by their aid,
with the addition of such further material as I could myself furnish,
these lectures have assumed their present shape; and I publish them,
because none of the works on proverbs which I know are exactly that
book for all readers which I could have wished to see. Either they
include matter which cannot be fitly placed before all—or they
address themselves to the scholar alone, or if not so, are at any rate
inaccessible to the mere English reader—or they contain bare lists
of proverbs, with no endeavour to compare, illustrate, and explain
them—or if they seek to explain, yet they do it without attempting to
sound the depths, or measure the real significance, of that which they
undertake to unfold. From these or other causes it has come to pass,
that with a multitude of books, many of them admirable, on a subject
so popular, there is no single one which is frequent in the hands of
men. I will not deny that, with all the slightness and shortcomings of
my own, I have still hoped to supply, at least for the present, this
deficiency.
ITCHENSTOKE, _December 13, 1852_.