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Some translations of the lesser works of Plutarch were published by Froben in August. The Adagia was passing through the press again with corrections and additions, and the preface which was originally destined for Badius.
Lyly drew examples, anecdotes, and fables which he used as Gascoigne suggested, not only from Heywood, but from the Similia and Adagia, of Erasmus, and from the Emblems of Alciati. So far the moral example is counseled or practised only as a recognized device of rhetoric. It is not transferred to poetic until George Whetstone's Dedication to his Promos and Cassandra.
We are confined in this island, more than ever, so that even letters are not carried abroad. This was the first of Erasmus's anti-war writings. He expanded it into the adage Dulce bellum inexpertis, which was inserted into the Adagia edition of 1515, published by Froben and afterwards also printed separately. Hereafter we shall follow up this line of Erasmus's ideas as a whole.
According to Beatus Rhenanus he had been reproached by some humanists, when about to publish the Adagia, for divulging the mysteries of their craft. But he desired that the book of antiquity should be open to all.
From the kings of his time he had for a long time expected peace in Church and State. They had disappointed him. But his severe judgement of princes he derived rather from classical reading than from political experience of his own times. In the later editions of the Adagia he often reverts to princes, their task and their neglect of duty, without ever mentioning special princes.
The importance of Erasmus' time in Italy is, then, that he completed, or at any rate published, the enlarged Adagia, his first considerable work, a book which carried his name far and wide throughout Europe, and won him fame amongst all who had pretensions to scholarship. No one reads it to-day.
In the last three years he had completed Jerome and the New Testament, and had also prepared for the press some of Seneca's philosophical writings, from manuscripts at King's and Peterhouse; besides lesser pieces of work. A difficulty arose about the printing. In 1512 he had been in negotiation with Badius Ascensius of Paris to undertake Jerome and a new edition of the Adagia.
Erasmus never coins a sentence which, rounded off and pithy, becomes a proverb and in this manner lives. There are no current quotations from Erasmus. The collector of the Adagia has created no new ones of his own. The true occupation for a mind like his was paraphrasing, in which, indeed, he amply indulged. Soothing down and unfolding was just the work he liked.
The reprint of the Adagia, published by John Philippi at Paris in 1505, had probably helped him through, for the time being; the edition cannot have been to his taste, for he had been dissatisfied with his work and wanted to extend it by weaving his new Greek knowledge into it.
Josse Badius printed all Erasmus offered him: the translations of Euripides and Lucian, a collection of Epigrammata, a new but still unaltered edition of the Adagia. In August the journey was continued. As he rode on horseback along the Alpine roads the most important poem Erasmus has written, the echo of an abandoned pursuit, originated.
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