A ROULING STONE GATHERS NO MOSSE
R., N.
Proverbs English, French, Dutch, Italian and Spanish. All Englished and alphabetically digested …
London, Printed for Simon Miller … 1659.
12mo, pp. [8], 151, [1], [6, advertisements], wanting the terminal leaf (a longitudinal half-title) as often; printed flaw affecting ‘9’ in the date of the imprint on the title-page, last leaf of advertisements adhered to endpaper, else a very good copy in contemporary sheep, rubbed; the Macclesfield copy, with blind-stamp and bookplate.
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Proverbs English, French, Dutch, Italian and Spanish. All Englished and alphabetically digested …
First and only edition of a scarce collection of idiomatic phrases and proverbs, many translated from other languages, with a selection of 114 ‘Golden sentences’ at the end.
The sources are wide-ranging – we note, for example, ‘A dwarf on a giant’s shoulders sees farther of the two’, an older sentiment but here quoting directly from George Herbert’s Jacula Prudentum, and ‘A rouling stone gathers no Mosse’ (presumably taken from Heywood’s Proverbes). Age-old saws include ‘A chip of the old block’, ‘I will not buy a pig in a poke’, ‘One swallow makes not a summer’, and ‘Ynough is as good as a Feast’. The golden sentences are more substantial, with attributions to Bacon, Plato, Henry Wotton.
ESTC lists eight copies: BL, Bodley; Staatsbibliothek Berlin; Harvard, Huntington, UCLA, Illinois, and Yale.
Wing R 56.
