‘A Rouling Stone Gathers No Mosse’
[PROVERBS.]
Proverbs English, French, Dutch, Italian, and Spanish. All Englished and alphabetically digested. By N.R. Gent … London, Simon Miller, 1659.
12mo, pp. [viii], 151, [1, blank], [6, advertisements]; without the final leaf (a longitudinal half-title) as often; woodcut ornament to title-page, woodcut initials and headpieces, the last digit of the date in the imprint not fully inked; light marginal foxing, final quire loose, small chips to final leaf, otherwise a very good copy; bound in contemporary sheep, traces of gilding to spine; rather rubbed; nineteenth-century armorial bookplate of the Earl of Macclesfield to front pastedown, with armorial blind-stamp to first three leaves.
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Proverbs English, French, Dutch, Italian, and Spanish. All Englished and alphabetically digested. By N.R. Gent …
First and only edition of a scarce collection of idiomatic phrases and proverbs, many translated from other languages, with a selection of 114 ‘Wise speeches and golden sentences’ at the end.
The sources are wide-ranging – 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 ‘The proof of the pudding is in the eating’. The speeches and sentences are more substantial, with attributions to Francis Bacon, Plato, Cato, and Henry Wotton.
ESTC R203333; Wing R56; Stirling Maxwell, Proverbs, Emblems etc., p. 75.