means that we should not so fly from any vice
as to be carried into a greater.[10] He quotes also another proverb with
the same signification: _Fumum fugiens, in ignem incidi_, which warns
against running into the fire to avoid the smoke. In his letters the
ancient fable recurs more than once. On one occasion he warns against
the dangers of youth, and says that the ears must be stopped, not, as in
the Homeric story, by wax, but "by the precepts of philosophy."[11] In
another letter he avows a fear lest in shunning Scylla he may fall on
Charybdis:--"_Nunc vereor ne sic vitemus hanc Scyllam, ut incidamus in
Charybdim multo perniciosiorem_."[12] Thus did his instinctive prudence
find expression in this familiar illustration.

If Erasmus had been less illustrious for learning,--perhaps if his
countenance were less interesting, as we now look upon it in the
immortal portraits by two great artists, Hans Holbein and Albert
Duerer,--I should not be tempted to dwell on this confession of
ignorance. And yet it belongs to the history of this verse, which has
had strange ups and downs in the world. The poem from which it is taken,
after enjoying an early renown, was forgotten,--and then again, after a
revival, was forgotten, again to enjoy another revival. The last time it
was revived through this solitary verse, without which, I cannot doubt,
it would have been extinguished in night.

"How far that little candle throws his beams!"

Even before the days of Erasmus, who died in 1536, this verse had been
lost and found. It was circulated as a proverb of unknown origin, when
Galeotto Marzio, an Italian, of infinite wit and learning[13] who
flourished in the latter half of the fifteenth century, and was for some
time the instructor of the children of Matthias Corvinus, King of
Hungary, pointed out its author. In a work of _Ana_, amusing and
instructive, entitled "De Doctrina Promiscua," which first saw the light
in Latin, and was afterwards translated into Italian, the learned author
says,--"Hoc carmen est Gualteri Galli de Gestis Alexandri, et non vagum
proverbium, ut quidam non omnino indocti meminerint." It was not a vague
proverb, as some persons not entirely unlearned have supposed, but a
verse of the "Alexandreis." And yet shortly afterwards the great master
of proverbs, whose learning seemed to know no bounds, could not fix its
origin. At a later day, Pasquier, in his "Recherches de la France,"[14]
I made substantially the