Читать книгу Proverbs of All Nations, Compared, Explained, and Illustrated онлайн

17 страница из 49

"Two good days for a man in this life:

When he weds and when he buries his wife."ssss1

Nor do the wives of Provence appear to be delighted with their conjugal lot. Having lost their youthful plumpness through the cares and toils of wedlock, they oddly declare that "If a stockfish became a widow it would fatten."ssss1 A Spanish woman's opinion of matrimony is thus expressed: "'Mother, what sort of a thing is marriage?' 'Daughter, it is spinning, bearing children, and weeping.'"ssss1

Better a tocher [dower] in her than wi' her.

A man's best fortune or his worst is his wife.

"The day you marry you kill or cure yourself" (Spanish).ssss1 "Use great prudence and circumspection," says Lord Burleigh to his son, "in choosing thy wife, for from thence will spring all thy future good or evil; and it is an action of life like unto a stratagem of war, wherein a man can err but once."

The gude or ill hap o' a gude or ill life

Is the gude or ill choice o' a gude or ill wife.

There is a Spanish rhyme much to the same effect:—