Nursery Rhyme. CVII. Proverbs.

        [Hours of sleep.]

    Nature requires five,
        Custom gives seven!
    Laziness takes nine,
        And Wickedness eleven.

            In July,
    Some reap rye;
            In August,
    If one will not the other must.

    Bounce Buckram, velvet's dear;
    Christmas comes but once a year.

    The mackerel's cry,
    Is never long dry.

    A sunshiny shower,
    Won't last half an hour.

        [One version of the following song, which I believe to be the genuine one, is written on the last leaf of MS. Harl. 6580, between the lines of a fragment of an old charter, originally used for binding the book, in a hand of the end of the seventeenth century, but unfortunately it is scarcely adapted for the "ears polite" of modern days.]

    A man of words and not of deeds,
    Is like a garden full of weeds;
    And when the weeds begin to grow,
    It's like a garden full of snow;
    And when the snow begins to fall,
    It's like a bird upon the wall;
    And when the bird away does fly,
    It's like an eagle in the sky;
    And when the sky begins to roar,
    It's like a lion at the door;
    And when the door begins to crack,
    It's like a stick across you...