ity this was done? If they know not, why should they judge? And if they knew this was done by the authority of the Supreme Pontiff, why do they not fear to condemn his decision which in other matters they desire to be considered sacred? Where is their wonderful and frequently boasted obedience when they hear not Christ, and asperse the Prince of the Church and the Vicar of Christ? Where is that meekness which they present with bowed head? where is that spirit dead to the world? But putting aside these, where is their humanity, their common sense? When there are so many misdemeanors not here mentioned which can be cast up to them, and in which they are publicly apprehended almost every day (I will not stir up things forbidden and unutterable), yet ceaselessly they bring up the laying aside of the habit as an inexpiable crime. What more inhuman than to upbraid one with his calamity, into which the malice of others hurried him? Who is so cruel as to upbraid a man for being lame when his leg has been broken by a mule? Who casts up his blindness to him who has lost an eye in battle? Who reproaches the epileptic or the leper with what nature inflicted on him? Who taunts with poverty the man who has lost his all in a shipwreck? No, on the contrary, men are so disposed that they pity such, and favor and assist them. all they can; and the more awful the misfortune the kinder they are to them.

But what greater misfortune could happen to a youth of fine intelligence than to be thrust into such a sort of life? Therefore, if it is cruelly inhuman for any one to accuse man of an infirmity as of a crime, what must we say of him who accuses another of an offense of which he was himself the cause? Just as if a quack should rail at him as one-eyed whose eye he himself had destroyed; or as if a pirate should upbraid him with being a slave whom he himself had dragged from freedom into slavery. Does not everyone say that it is the height of shamelessness to throw the burden of your own crime on another? What other than this thing do they do who have imposed on the simplicity of this boy by the worst artifices, and afterwards reproach him with a crime which was their own? Do you not therein see the greatest cruelty combined with the greatest stupidity and lack of shame? To them belongs the blame, and yet they desire another to bear the onus. But the ignominy belongs not to him who has fallen into the ditch, but to those who thrust him therein. He laid aside his habit, but you compelled him to put it on. Who ever brought it as a charge against a captured prisoner that he escaped from pirates? Not even the pirates themselves, I think. All others rejoiced with him. Any man is a pirate to him whose liberty he seeks to take away by force. And, if it please you to use less odious comparisons, if a cobbler grows angry with a customer who has rejected a boot, elegant, but not fitting his foot, will he not properly answer, "You are to blame yourself for putting such a boot on me. That it is a handsome boot I do not deny, but it pinches my foot terribly."

There is no reason why an institution may not be very good in itself, but yet to this man or that man be pernicious.

To make an end, my friend, if I have made out a case for my Florentius, in an especial manner I ask you, as quickly as possible and according to the wishes of my heart, to facilitate the obtaining of this request. Do not worry about the expense; I will be responsible. In the space which seems to be vacant at the end of this letter, I have designated a few things which perhaps will be required for making out the decree. They are written in the cypher I sent you with my last letter, but you will not be able to read them unless you hold them near the fire. By this courier I await a response. He will stay at Rome for a fortnight, or not much less. Farewell."

Well, here we have at length this famous letter, concerning which there has been much discussion. On account of the nature of the statements made therein some have regarded it as mere literature, not to be taken as fact. Among others who maintain this position is Nichols, who has given us a partial translation of some of the letters. of Erasmus. The great weight of evidence seems to point, however, to the reality of the facts given, and assures that absolute credence can be given to every statement therein contained. The present writer agrees in the main with the writers holding this latter view, but with some reservations which will be here set down. We may not accept everything that he says as absolutely true; for like all special pleaders he is bound to make out his case at any event. We must yield him allowance for the exigencies of his case; we must strip off the rhetorical adornments, and analyze the letter statement by statement, and sentence by sentence. But first to speak of it in general, and to note how it has been regarded by his biographers. Emerton, who published a very able and well-considered Life of Erasmus in 1899, after stating that any biographer of Erasmus must be always striving to fix the line where history ends and literature begins, says:

[Erasmus] felt himself to be the centre of the world. In a şense that is true of every thinking man; but in Erasmus this newly awakened individual consciousness took on a form of acute personal sensitiveness which affected his relation to all persons and all things about him. Especially it reacted upon his writing. He could not be objective on any question into which his personality entered ever so slightly. Whatever touched him as a man, as a scholar, a theologian, a churchman, or a citizen, began at once to lose its true perspective. He saw it only in relation to himself, or at best to the cause of pure learning, which he always felt to be embodied in himself.

He goes on to say:

The biographers have not tried in any consistent fashion to measure them [these qualities of Erasmus] as affecting the value Eras. Ep. 447.

of our sources of knowledge. . . . If we should reject, for example, the letter to Grunnius, or the Colloquy on The Eating of Fish as sources for Erasmus' early life, we should have very little left. If we should accept them as history, we should be mingling fact and fancy in altogether uncertain proportions. The only safe method is, therefore, to try in each case to weigh the value of the text before us with fullest reference to all the circumstances.

Again he calls the incident mentioned in the Grunnius letter, where Erasmus represents himself as having been mobbed on account of his habit, "a cock-and-bull story," and coincides with Drummond in the latter's opinion that the thing is too silly to be believed."

Pennington in his Life and Character of Erasmus, published in 1875, says that "the letter certainly shows some self-conceit." Drummond says, "The whole letter is written in a somewhat extravagant tone, as if the object were to prevail with the Pope by putting him in good humor, and showing him what a clever fellow Erasmus was, rather than by convincing his reason by a temperate statement of facts." Again he says: "One cannot help perceiving that he has made the most of his case. Possibly subsequent experience was permitted to color his narrative. Possibly his resistance was scarcely so determined, or his feelings so strong as he chose afterwards to represent them.".

Nichols says, "We may well believe that the good library which the little monastery of Steyn possessed was among the chief inducements which overcame whatever disinclination Erasmus may have had for a conventual life." 10

Emerton, better than any other of his biographers, it seems to us, has described the salient phases of his character, as far at least as they are evident to us in his comments on men and things throughout his letters; and the present writer thoroughly agrees with him in the statements he makes in the following quotations:

He was already showing that joy in the idea of being persecuted which later seems to have reacted on his memory of his earliest years. It flattered his vanity to think that men cared enough about him to abuse him, and such abuse gave him an added claim upon the devotion of his friends. His nature demanded affection and admiration, and he was ready to repay them in kind, so long as he thereby incurred no lasting or burdensome obligation.11 Speaking of the trip which Erasmus meditated to Italy, Emerton goes on to say:

Probably nothing would have done so much to chase away the megrims that were always pestering him. He would have had less 'Emerton, Desiderius Erasmus, pp. xv-xvi and 132. N. Y., 1899.

8

10

Drummond, Erasmus, Vol. I, p. 16, note.

Ibid., Vol. I, p. 21.

Epistles of Erasmus, Vol. II, p. 351, note. 11 Desiderius Erasmus, p. 48.

reason to complain of his digestion and his bad sleeping-but if he could not have complained he would, perhaps, have been unhappier still.... Erasmus speaks in the [Grunnius] letter as if his intellectual life had been utterly crushed by the discipline of the monastery, but on the other hand there is every indication that he had all the opportunity for study that he could desire. . . . The monastery had served his purpose, and now he was ready for something wider and freer, but he could not justify his quitting the monastic life without piling charges upon charges against the institution that had tided over for him, as gently as its conditions permitted, these years of helplessness.

12 Ibid., pp. 49, 22-23.

12

CHAPTER III

EARLY SCHOOL DAYS: ANALYSIS OF THE LETTER TO GRUNNIUS

Now let us proceed to analyze the letter itself. His first accusation is that there were certain monks who went everywhere seeking to decoy candidates into their Order. This may be granted; for it is probable that there was in Erasmus' day a sort of competition among the various Orders in securing the most promising candidates for their ranks; and this in some instances may have given rise to injustice and abuse. But it was not a general custom by any means. It was always accounted an honor to serve God in one of these religious houses; and the number of applicants was generally greater than that of the places to be filled. The selection depended on the undoubted vocation of the applicant as of primary importance, and, secondarily, on his ability to fulfill the duties. which might be placed upon him. His wealth, other things being equal, would be no bar to his admission; and under the conditions which have controlled the actions of men in all ages would rather make him a more desirable acquisition. Remarkable talent in a candidate would also be acceptable, or special skill in any line of activity that might benefit the Order and advance the work that it was doing for humanity; the possession of these qualities would make some candidates more desirable than others. And hence monks who were too zealous might have overstepped the bounds of moderation in seeking to strengthen their own Order by the admission of the most promising applicants, even to the extent of coaxing them away from other Orders which were competing with them in the same line of endeavor. It would be impossible to set a limit to the various sorts of allurements that overzealous monks might use for their purposes, or the bad taste they might display in putting their little artifices into effect. All that it would be proper to state here in this regard is that such things were the exception and not the rule. Erasmus himself says that not all monks did this thing, but only certain ones.1 But he says that "by far the greater number of them become monks on account of stupidity, ignorance, despair, a desire for ease, and the hope of being fed." The thought presents itself at once to us that the Orders certainly were not using ordinary business acumen in seeking recruits of such character, and one is very much inclined to doubt the statement. Indeed, Erasmus himself, in the same breath, shows that their efforts were bent in much more promising directions, for he says, "where is the boy of talent, or position, or wealth, whom they have not insidiously allured?" This certainly would be more in keeping with what we should expect these religious houses to do. We will have to allow for an occasional rhetorical flourish, in which style of writing Erasmus is very 1 "Scio tibi, vir optime, et probe notam et insigniter inuisam esse quorundam pharisaicorum improbitatem," etc.