Who is seventeenth-century english proverb?

Famous quotes containing the words seventeenth-century english and/or english:

    A degenerate nobleman is like a turnip. There is nothing good of him but that which is underground.
    Seventeenth-century English saying.

    ... in the nineteen-thirties ... the most casual reader of murder mysteries could infallibly detect the villain, as soon as there entered a character who had recently washed his neck and did not commit mayhem on the English language.
    Ellen Glasgow (1873–1945)