Meaning & Analysis
A touchstone tests whether gold is genuine; likewise, gold (wealth) tests whether a person is genuine—revealing true character.
Insights
Wealth as assay
Money functions like a moral reagent: its presence exposes alloy in the soul—greed, pride, or generosity—that ordinary circumstances may hide.
Prosperity’s trial
Adversity tests endurance, but prosperity tests integrity. The ease and options wealth provides tempt one to cut corners or to cultivate magnanimity.
Power and stewardship
Gold stands for power to act. How one allocates resources—hoards, squanders, or shares—reveals the governing ethic beneath public speech.
Authenticity vs. appearance
Just as gilt can mimic gold, polite manners can mimic virtue; exposure to riches separates durable character from plated pretense.
Assay to ethics
The proverb transfers a craft image—rubbing metal on a touchstone—to moral judgment: the reliable ‘stone’ for men is their behavior around wealth.
Ancient pedigree
Bacon attributes a like saying to the sage Chilon: gold is tried by the touchstone, and men by gold. The line condenses a classical suspicion that riches unmask us.
Emblematic pairing
Companion proverbs—‘Gold is tried in the fire,’ ‘Time tries friends’—build a taxonomy of trials. Here, the tester becomes the tested, sharpening the paradox of means and ends.
Psychology of temptation
Abundance widens choice and blunts restraint; mere cues of money can prime self-focus. The proverb anticipates this by making wealth the decisive revealer of motive.
Social trust
Communities often entrust office to the solvent and successful; the maxim warns that riches are not proof of virtue but the very crucible in which virtue may fail.
Rhetorical Devices
Parallelism
Balanced halves (‘as … so …’) create a clean analogy that reads like a tested law.
Chiasmus
Tester and tested invert: first touchstone→gold, then gold→men. The role reversal crystallizes the lesson that instruments of proof exist in every sphere.
Metonymy
‘Gold’ stands for wealth and material power; a concrete metal names an abstract social force.
Personification
Gold ‘tries’ men as an active examiner, dramatizing temptation as a living judge.
Epigrammatic brevity
Compact, proverbial cadence lets the analogy strike and stick, like a hallmark stamped on coin.
Transcription
Quotations
But as the true golde is tryed by the touch . . . so the loyall heart of the faithfull louer, is knowen by the tryall of his Lady.
The touchstone trieth the golde.
As golde tried by the touchstone: so riches do shew what is in a man.
Like as Gold is tryed with a touchstone: Euen so is man tried by hauing Gold and much Riches.
Chilon would say, That gold was tried with the touchstone, and men with gold.
Integrity is the proper portion of a Judge. Men have a touch-stone whereby to try gold, but gold is the touch-stone whereby to try men.
Shakespeare Citations
The fifth, an hand environed with clouds, Holding out gold that's by the touchstone tried.
Cross References
Related Proverbs
Original Scan
Used under CC BY-NC 3.0.