Democratic Sentinel, Volume 15, Number 45, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 27 November 1891 — Great Age of Familiar Sayings. [ARTICLE]

Great Age of Familiar Sayings.

After all, the newest authors are the oldest. In this new edition (“Familiar Quotations”) we have familiar sayings traced away back to Greece and Egypt. A new author by the name of Pilpay figures in this edition. He was a Brahmin, and he lived several centuries before Christ. Writing in some early dialect of Sanscrit, he deliberately, and with the most horrible heathen depravity, stole some of the best sayings of Herrick, Shakspeare, Butler, Cibber, and others. He was bold enough to appropriate such modern sayings as “What is bred in the bone will come out of the flesh,” “Possession is the strongest tenure of the Jaw,” and so on. Hesiod, who wrote in the seventh century before Christ, was another of those antique plagiarists. Theognis, JEschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Plautus, Terence, and many others, were great suppliers of modern familiar quotations. Every time you say “hence these tears,” “the flower of youth,” “I do not care one straw,” “with presence of mind,” or anyone of several other things equally familiar, you are simply quoting Terence, who died 159 years before Christ. All the way through he is as modern as Mr. Howells. Here is one of his sayings, and after it is quoted nothing more need be said: “In fine, nothing is said now that has not been said before.” —Boston Transcript.