Distel und Dorn stechen sehr Falsche Zungen noch viel mehr. Auch wolt ich lieber in Disteln und Dornen baden Denn mit falschen Zungen seyn beladen.

[Thistle and thorn prick badly / false tongues much more / And yet I’d rather bathe in thistles / than be burdened by false tongues].

The Keils noted that in the album of one G.J. Reich (present whereabouts unknown), Elizabeth, Duchess of Saxony, penned the above rhyme and dated her entry 1615. [Keil & Keil (1893), 56], and a little earlier it was entered in the album of Caspar Hoffmann from Silesia. Here it is, penned in the album of Christoph Felber, in 1645:

A 17C tile bearing the same rhyme — referred to as a Spruch-Kachel — is preserved in the Schweizerisches Landesmuseum in Zurich, but the only illustration of this Spruch I’m aware of, is in yet another medium — on the exterior of a graffito-house, the Heydl House in Prachatice in the Czech Republic, dated 1557 — an all but naked woman shown ‘bathing’ amongst the thorns and thistles!

40 years earlier, however, the Spruch was painted on a banderole on the reverse of a ?Swabian portrait of one terminally glum-looking Katharina Barsch:

It reads: Tistel steche[n] ser vill [fal]sche zunge[n] noch vil mer vil liebr in tistel baden dan[n] mit falschen zunge[n] sein beladen [thistles prick very many, false tongues many more; much better to bathe in thistles than to be burdened with false tongues]

Great stuff!