Meaning & Analysis
A lofty, proud disposition does not fit with an empty or meagre purse; high-minded vanity clashes with poverty.
Insights
Status–Means Mismatch
Grand desires and showy self-regard sit badly upon scant resources; pretension without provision breeds strain and ridicule.
Economy of Pride
Pride is costly—requiring display, largesse, and leisure—so a ‘beggar’s purse’ cannot fund the performances a proud spirit demands.
Self-Deception
The proud heart in poverty masks lack with boast and costume, sustaining a fragile fiction that collapses under practical needs.
Social Friction
Proud poverty resents correction, borrows beyond means, and quarrels with patrons; the mismatch corrodes relationships and reputation.
Counsel of Moderation
Adjust wants to means: cultivate modesty when the purse is light so that character and condition harmonize instead of war.
Sumptuary Background
Early modern societies policed dress and display; the proverb echoes anxieties about people aping their betters—‘a lord’s stomach’ strapped to a beggar’s pouch.
Moralized Economics
Pride is framed as a fiscal vice: it converts scarcity into debt and shame, where humility would convert it into prudence and peace.
Gender & Class Variants
Attested with ‘lady’s heart’ and ‘lord’s heart,’ the line travels across rank and sex, indicting the universal temptation to live above station.
Proverbial Network
Kin to warnings against long tongues, loose lives, and boasting, it joins a cluster that links interior vice to outward ruin.
Psychology of Face
To save face, the proud poor overinvest in appearances; the proverb spotlights the cognitive dissonance between identity claims and material reality.
Rhetorical Devices
Antithesis
Pairs ‘proud heart’ with ‘beggar’s purse’ to dramatize the clash of high self-estimate and low means.
Synecdoche
‘Heart’ stands for ambition and character; ‘purse’ for wealth and capacity, reducing complex lives to two emblematic organs.
Parallelism
Balanced noun-phrases create a clean, see-saw rhythm that fixes the incompatibility in memory.
Alliterative Hint
Soft h/p sounds (‘heart’/‘beggar’s purse’) lend mnemonic snap to a moral contrast.
Gnomical Compression
A terse judgment converts social wisdom into a portable rule about aligning desires with means.
Transcription
Quotations
A lordes stomake and a beggers pouche Full ill accordeth.
Lo Here one may se that there is none wors Than is a proude herte and a beggers purs.
There is nothyng in this worlde that agreeth wurs, Than dothe a ladies hert, and a beggers purs.
Euyl doth a lordes hart and a beggers purse accord.
Three things by no means tollerable. A long tongue in a fooles head. A loose life in a godly professor. A proud heart and a beggers purse.
A booster who being in pouertie will seeme to be rich, as we say a proud hart and a beggers purse.
Ha, Ha, a proud minde and a Beggers purse.
(A Lords).
A proud minde and a beggers purse, goeth together.
(doe not well agree).
(were neuer louing companions).
A Lords heart, and a beggars purse.
[As in 1623 Cam.].
A proud mind and a beggers purse agree not well together.
There's nothing agrees worse then a proud mind and a beggers purse.
Related Proverbs
Original Scan
Used under CC BY-NC 3.0.