"The spirit I have seen may be the Devil; and the Devil hath power to assume a pleasing shape." (Hamlet)

On the way to China Gardens, during our conversation, Rhoda said that "The road to hell is paved with good intentions." And so I wondered how that expression originated. It was thought that Samuel Johnson first used it, but that has been shown to be false. There are various other suggestions, but none of them really comes to any theory that can be trusted. Another expression regarding a trip to Hell is "He is going to Hell in a hand basket." The only logical origin of this saying goes back to the French Revolution during the use of the guillotine to lop off a head and thus the victim is on the way to Hell in a "hand basket." Hopefully it can float on the River Styx, a la Moses. These expressions are responsible for the difficulty in learning English. At the Boynton Mall today all I heard was Spanish in the various venues we went to. There are several other variations on the subject of Hell. For example, in the poem, "The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam," Omar says, "I sent my soul into the invisible, some letter of that afterlife to spell, and by and by my soul returned and said, "I myself am Heaven and Hell." Then again, John Milton in "Paradise Lost" after the fall of Satan and his cohorts has him state, "The mind is its own place and of itself can make a Heaven of Hell and a Hell of Heaven." But my favorite Hell statement belongs to Jean Paul Sartre in his play, "No Exit" when one character says, "Hell is other people." You can't go wrong with that one.

Besides the voyage to Hell, there are other proverbial expressions in the language whose origins are difficult, if not impossible, to record. But some can be found in print. Par example: "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder."

This saying first appeared in the 3rd century BC in Greek. It didn't appear in its current form in print until the 19th century, but in the meantime there were various written forms that expressed much the same thought. Shakespeare expressed a similar sentiment in Love's Labours Lost, 1588:

"Good Lord Boyet, my beauty, though but mean, Needs not the painted flourish of your praise: Beauty is bought by judgement of the eye, Not utter'd by base sale of chapmen's tongues."

The person who is widely credited with coining the saying in its current form is Margaret Wolfe Hungerford (née Hamilton), who wrote many books, often under the pseudonym of 'The Duchess'. In Molly Bawn, 1878, there's the line "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder", which is the earliest citation of it that can be found in print. I don't want to belabor the point at this time...and I really don't know what the point is. However, I will continue with some other overused expressions in a future blog...Tomorrow is another day.