"I have thought better, with two of the eight, to minister
unto you a taste of this bothe delectable and fruitefull
recreation."

Those who are desirous of knowing at large the course pursued by Erasmus in
the compilation of this amusing and once popular work, will find it fully
stated in his preface; one passage of which will show the large licence he
allowed himself:--

"Sed totum opus quodammodo meum feci, dum et explanatius
effero qua Graece referuntur, interjectis interdum quæ apud
alios autores additur comperissem," &c.

The only sure ground, as far as I can discover, for this gradually
constructed legend, is the mention of the flight of Demosthenes by
Æschines and Dinarchus. In the more amplified editions of Erasmus's
_Adages_, after the publication of the Apophthegmata, he repeats the story
in illustration of a Latin proverb (probably only a version of the Greek),
"Vir fugiens et denuo pugnabitur;" and I find in some collections of the
sixteenth century both the Latin and Greek given upon the authority of
Plutarch! Langius, in his _Polyanthea_ (a copious common-place book which
would outweigh twenty of our late Laureate's) has given the apophthegm
verbatim from Erasmus, and has boldly appended Plutarch's name. But the
more extraordinary course is that which one Gualandi took, who published,
at Venice, in 1568,{4} in 4to., an _omnium gatherum_, in five books, from
various sources, in which there is much taken from Erasmus, and yet the
title is _Apoftemmi di Plutarco_. In this book, the whole of the
twenty-three apophthegms of Erasmus which relate to Demosthenes are given,
and two more added at the end. It appears that Philelphus, and after him
Raphael Regius, had printed, in the fifteenth century, Latin collections