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 same remark as Marzio. After alluding to the early fame of its author, he says,--"C'est lui dans les oeuvres duquel nous trouvons un vers, souvent par nous allegue sans que plusieurs sachent qui en fut l'auteur." In quoting this verse the French author uses _Decidis_ instead of _Incidis_. The discovery by Marzio, and the repetition of this discovery by Pasquier, are chronicled at a later day in the Conversations of Menage, who found a French Boswell before the Bosweil of Dr. Johnson was born.[15] Jortin, in the elaborate notes to his Life of Erasmus, borrows from Menage, and gives the same history.[16]