Source.—Lluyd, Archaeologia Britannia, 1707, the first comparative Celtic grammar and the finest piece of work in comparative philology hitherto done in England, contains this tale as a specimen of Cornish then still spoken in Cornwall. I have used the English version contained in Blackwood's Magazine as long ago as May 1818. I have taken the third counsel from the Irish version, as the original is not suited virginibus puerisque, though harmless enough in itself.

Parallels.—Lover has a tale, The Three Advices. It occurs also in modern Cornwall ap. Hunt, Drolls of West of England, 344, "The Tinner of Chyamor." Borrow, Wild Wales, 41, has a reference which seems to imply that the story had crystallised into a Welsh proverb. Curiously enough, it forms the chief episode of the so-called "Irish Odyssey" ("Merugud Uilix maiec Leirtis"—"Wandering of Ulysses M'Laertes"). It was derived, in all probability, from the Gesta Romanorum, c. 103, where two of the three pieces of advice are "Avoid a byeway," "Beware of a house where the housewife is younger than her husband." It is likely enough that this chapter, like others of the Gesta, came from the East, for it is found in some versions of "The Forty Viziers," and in the Turkish Tales (see Oesterley's parallels and Gesta, ed. Swan and Hooper, note 9).