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Excerpt from A Treatise of Morall Philosophie: Wherein Is Contained the Worthy Sayings of Philosophers, Emperours, Kings, and Orators; Their Lives and Answers, (1547) <p>But possibly we credit Baldwin with too much shrewdness: the 16th century book market, both in Em gland and on the Continent, had an omnivorous appetite for assemblages of proverbs and commonplaces. Erasmus, a shrewder man than Baldwin, had sensed this trend by the penultimate year of the previous century; he produced in 1500 in Paris his first compilation of 818 entries, which he later augmented to 3260 entries in the magnifi cent Venice folio of 1508 entitled Erasmi Roterdamz' Adagiaram Chiliades Tres (the British Museum catalogue lists some 68 variant editions). And everybody borrowed from Erasmus, notably J. Sartorius of Amsterdam (d. Who used a similar title for his compilation (i have only seen the 1670 edition) of 3177 entries. Of course, Erasmus quoted and borrowed too (see the Chicago dissertation of Theodore C. Appelt, and he did not differentiate sharply between classical sen tences and folk sayings (see Harold E. Pagliaro in fmla for March, At any rate this concern with common places, with ethics - or private morals - and with politics - or public morals - was so conspicuous in Elizabethan writing that Roy Battenhouse in his study of Marlowe's Tamhurlaine (1941) was moved to argue that moral philosophy was the dominant intellectual concern of the Elizabethan age (p. 2 Such a view might have offended the sober theologians of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, who could point to the enormous production of theo logical tomes from Tyndale or Jewel or Hooker through the great Puritan writers, Bradshaw, Perkins, or Sibbes. And we must remember that belles lettres, being con cerned with what happens rather than with what hap pened, must always be ultimately proverbial in substance. Yet the problem is almost insoluble: Miss Edith Klotz in her subject analysis of English imprints for every tenth year f