There is one more proverb to mention as a possible influence, the common European proverb "A good lawyer, an evil neighbour," which has been traced back to Randle Cotgrave's A Dictionarie of the French and English Tongue of 1611 (Cotgrave 1970, sub Avocat; see also Smith 1935, 12; Stevenson 1948, 1370; Apperson 1969, 353; Whiting 1977, 255; Mieder et al. 1992, 365). The early American minister and writer Cotton Mather stated in 1710: "There has been an old Complaint, That a Good Lawyer seldom is a good Neighbour," and Benjamin Franklin cited it in June 1737 in his Poor Richard's Almanack as "A good Lawyer, a bad Neighbour" (Brooks 1979, 50; see also Barbour 1974, 116; Whiting 1977, 355). The meaning of this proverb is that lawyers make bad neighbours because they might use their legal knowledge against a trusting neighbour. It exists also in a slightly expanded variant, "A good lawyer makes a bad neighbour" (Pickering 1997, 156).
