Not having sufficient for your own support, do you pretend to keep dogs? This was used to be applied to persons whose income, insufficient to supply them with necessaries, was laid out in superfluities; in keeping servants and horses, or in an ostentatious use of gaudy clothes, furniture, or other articles of luxury, unbecoming their circumstances. "Los que cabras no tienen, y cabritos venden, de donde lo vienen?" those who, having no goats, yet sell kids, whence do they get them? is said by the Spaniards, of persons who, having no estates, or known income, yet contrive to live at a great expense.

Which cannot be better exemplified than by the following lines:

–––– «Time lays his hand
On pyramids of brass, and ruins quite
What all the fond artificers did think
Immortal workmanship. He sends his worms
To books, to old records, and they devour
Th' inscriptions; he loves ingratitude,
For he destroys the memory of man».

Time brings all things to light. Truth has therefore been called the daughter of Time, or as the Spaniards say, of God, "la verdad es hija de Dios"; the wicked man hence knows no peace, but lives in perpetual fear that time, the great revealer of secrets, should tear off the veil that hides his crimes and shew him in his true colours. But time also overturns and destroys every thing, and takes away even the memory of them.

I see land, may be said by persons getting nearly to the end of a long and troublesome business, or concluding any great work or labour; more directly, and to this the adage owes its origin, by those who have been a long time time at sea, and perhaps been driven about by adverse winds, on first espying the shore, «Thank God, I once more see land!».

A snail's pace, he moves slower than a snail, or is fit to drive snails, are phrases applied to persons who are extremely sluggish. Vicistis cochleam tarditate.