(Samuel) Butler’s Law
Spare the rod and spoil the child.
This approach to child-rearing was by no means original to Samuel Butler, but his expression of it in Hudibras (1663), a mock-epic satirising the Puritans, appears to be the first statement of the law in what is considered to be its classic form. The complete couplet:
Love is a boy by poets stydled
Then spare the rod and spoil the child.
This is only one of many proverbial sayings in the poem e.g. “make the fur fly”, “made his mouth to water”, “have a care o’ the main chance”. and “look before you ere you leap.”
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