Meaning & Analysis
He presents an appearance of such cool gentleness and innocence that even warm butter would not melt in his mouth.
Insights
Feigning innocence
Outward meekness masks inward cunning; the cool, demure façade conceals appetite, guile, or mischief.
Cold control
‘Butter’ that should melt is imagined not to, implying emotional coldness or calculated self-possession beneath sweet manners.
Weaponized politeness
Smooth speech and shy smiles become tools to disarm others, gaining trust or advantage while hiding true intentions.
Appearance vs. appetite
The later tag, ‘cheese won’t choke her,’ flips the mask: behind dainty looks is a hearty, even voracious, capacity—social or sensual.
Longstanding idiom
From sixteenth-century conduct literature to Restoration drama, the phrase marks practiced demureness; variants swap in marmalade or add the cheese riposte to puncture pretended delicacy.
Biblical echo
It resonates with Psalm 55:21’s trope of ‘butter-smooth’ words covering hostility, aligning sweetness of tongue with hidden aggression.
Gendered performance
Often aimed at women in early texts, the accusation polices modesty as performance; yet it also targets ‘sly knaves,’ showing that coy self-presentation cuts across gender.
Thermal symbolism
Melting maps warmth and sincerity; refusing to melt encodes chill calculation. The mouth—site of speech—links temperature to rhetoric and intention.
Class and civility
Polite veneers (courtly smiles, measured tones) can be read as duplicity by streetwise observers; the proverb is a plebeian critique of genteel smoothness.
Rhetorical Devices
Simile
The ‘as if’ frame yokes an everyday kitchen image to moral character, making hypocrisy palpable.
Irony
Praises surface gentleness to insinuate its opposite—slyness or appetite—creating a neat reversal.
Sensory imagery
Butter, warmth, melting: tactile cues translate abstract duplicity into mouthfeel and temperature.
Antithesis
Contrasts seeming cool purity with implied inner heat, staging the conflict between look and reality.
Colloquial cadence
Plain, vivid diction makes the charge portable—a quick label for smooth hypocrites.
Transcription
Quotations
(He maketh as thoughe butter).
(She lookth as butter and her mouth).
I follow rather mine own inclination, than to take the pains to speak as butter would not melt in my mouth.
There are some servantes, who in their maisters presence, looke as though butter would not melte in their mouth.
And of so temperate Carriage, that Butter would not melt in their Mouths.
[1612] See how she simpers it, as if marmalade Would not melt in her mouth!
(as though).
(She looks as and her mouth).
(A cunning knave, a sly coult, that carries it, as if that butter).
(As demure as if butter).
The Jade simpers as if Butter would not melt in her mouth; but cheese of three half pence a pound won't choak her, as the old saying is.
(He looked and would not have melted).
She looks as if butter wou'dn't melt in her mouth; but, I warrant, cheese won't choke her.
Annotations
- Spoken of roguish Fellows, who upon Occasion, and Design, look and speak demurely.
Related Proverbs
Original Scan
Used under CC BY-NC 3.0.