The Antiquity of Familiar Quotations

Feilding Star, Volume XIII, Issue 143, 31 May 1892, Page 4

The Antiquity of Familiar Quotations

■♦ After all, the newest authors are the oldest. In this new edition (' Familiar Quotations') we have a lot of familiar sayings traced away back to Greece and E^ypt. 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, Shakespeare, Butler, Cibber, and others. He was bold enough to appropriate such modern sayings as " What is bred in the bone will never come out of tho flesh," " Possession is the strongest tenure of the law," and so on. flesoid , who wrote in the seventh century before Christ, was another of these antique plagiarists. Theognis, iEschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Plautue, 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 any one 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."