New Orleans daily crescent. [volume] ([New Orleans, La.]) 1851-1866, 1853-12-31
EDITORIAL BooK.MoTEs.

ION the lessons In Proverbs being the substance Of
lectures delivered to the Young Mems Societies Ports
mouth and elsewhere by Richard Cheyenx Trench D.,
author Of The Study of Words etc, Vicar of Itchen
stoke Examining Chaplain to the Lord Bishop of OK
ford and Professor of Ivinity, Kings College, London
RsdheId New York, 1852 limo. pp. 14o.
We have here something quite worthy of
subject at once curious and wise book which
forms most opposite contrast to another, but
awhile since of an unbounded success in this
country, in spite of its being one of the most
utterly senseless productions that ever saw the
light anywhere we mean Mr.. Martin Farquar
Tupper's Proverbial Philosophy" That nota-
BILE performance now coming fairly in our way
we shall seize the occasion of paying double
debt, and Of showing through Upper what
Proverbs are not, in order that we may the
better explain through Mr.. Trench what Pro-
verbs are.
The secret of some peoples success is thing
unfathomable. Call it, if you will, the work of
Fortune: but how does that account for the
matter The caprices of Fortune may, by a
singular concurrence Of events, heap wealth
upon this man and siuk that other into poverty;
lift up the obscure and even the undeserving to
such honor (and it is exceedingly little) as the
vain buzz of the instant can bestow. When
the crowd acts and clamor is the Judgment,
there must be mistake; indeed, the whole re-
suit is but matter Of "hit or miss But all
this is folly and mistake, not fortune it is not
chance, but error; and it would be as reasona-
BILE to refer such cases to the power of the god
dess Error as the goddess Chance. How does
either account for the thing Literary success
is surely not matter of accident, unless it is
thing no longer decided by the enlightened,
but by the ignorant Now, the wonder and the
puzzle to US is, to conceive how any man, with
sense enough to enable him to learn to read,
could look into any page or almost any sentence
of the s'Proverbial Philosophy" without dis
covering that it was as mere splendid twaddle,
as absolute high sounding balderdash, as ever
was composed and that Mr.. Martin Farquar
Upper was one of the most intolerable Of block
heads
The very name of the book augured no little
its folly. For it intimated that Philosophy could
convert itself into the practical sense of the
common people and deal out their homely wis.,
dom; or that proverb-makers were to philoso-
phize. "Proverbs are the wisdom and the wit
of the people, says Lord Bacon, in defining
them. The people do not philosophize; the phi
losophers do not proverbalize but little Upper,
forsooth, is great enough to embody sages and
the people in himself and both to make the rude
and the cultivated catch the pecu-
liar thinking of the rude But look at what he
has produced scrutinize ever 80 little the mon
grel things which he calls philosophic proverbs.
What are they They are neither the one nor
he other have not mark of either progeni-
;urs and belong only to that precreation which
Milton describes" the brood of Folly without
ather bred" They are not proverbs; they are
ot sxioms they are not maxims they are
imply most weak and mystical nonsense wrapped
D in most fantastical forms of expression, and,
word szs most pompous and shallow enigmas !