Latin language, and have its own poets, orators, historians, in Christian languages. The close is very curious as bearing on the literary history of the time. It is a long criticism, which of course gave much offence, of all the Latin authors of the day throughout Europe, of their writings, and of their style; and as almost everybody wrote in Latin it is a full survey of the men of letters of his age. Alas! how many sonorous names, terminating in the imposing and all-honoured 'us,' have perished from the memory of man, a few perhaps undeservedly, most of them utterly and for ever! Longolius was the only Barbarian admitted to the privilege of Ciceronianism. The tract closes with a ludicrous account of the reception of a civis Romanus, by a club or society of Ciceronians at Rome. 6 But the work which displayed to the utmost the unbounded erudition of Erasmus was his Adagia.' The clever definition of a proverb, erroneously attributed to a statesman of our day, 'the wisdom of many and the wit of one,' does not answer to the Adagia' of Erasmus. This book is a master-key to all the strange and recondite sayings scattered about in the classic writers, and traces them to their origin. They are arranged under different heads, in alphabetical order, as 'absurdities,' 'arrogance,'' avarice.' Sometimes he takes one of these sayings for the text of a long dissertation. The Adagia' is thus a rich and very curious storehouse of his opinions. On 'Festina Lentè,' he discusses the whole question of printing and the abuses of the Press; on 'Simulation and Dissimulation,' the Church, the wealth and pomp of the clergy; on 'Monacho Indoctior,' he brands the ignorance and immorality of the monks; on 'Dulce Bellum Inexpertis,' the folly and wickedness of war. Nothing displays in a more wonderful degree the vast, multifarious, and profound erudition of Erasmus than this work. Even in the present day, with all our subsidiary aids to learning, the copiousness, variety, and extent of his reading move our astonishment. Not the most obscure writer seems to have escaped his curiosity. In the first edition he complained of the want of Greek books, in the later the Greeks of every age are familiarly cited; the Latin are entirely at his command. Some proverbs were added by later writers; some of his conjectural interpretations of abstruse sayings have been corrected, but with all its defects it remains a monument of very marvellous industry. The reception of this work displays no less the passion for that kind of learning, and the homage paid in all quarters to its author. The first edition, avowedly imperfect, was printed at Paris in 1500. It was followed by two at Strasburg; it was reprinted by Erasmus himself, in a more full and complete form at Venice, in 1508. This edition was imitated, without the knowledge of Erasmus, by Frobenius, afterwards his dear friend, at Basil. Seven editions followed with great rapidity, bearing the fame of the author to every part of Christendom, which was now eager for the cultivation of classical learning. II. Erasmus was no less the declared opponent, and took great part in the discomfiture of scholasticism, and of the superstitions of the middle ages. 6 At length Erasmus, that great injured name Pope's wild torrent' is not a very happy illustration of the scholasticism which had so long oppressed the teaching of Europea stagnant morass' or an impenetrable jungle' had been a more apt similitude. Few, however, did more to emancipate the human mind from the Thomism and the Scotism, the pseudo-Aristotelism, which ruled and wrangled in all the schools of Europe. Erasmus fell in, in this respect, with the impatience and the ardent aspirations of all who yearned for better days. In Italy the yoke was already broken: the monks, especially on this side of the Alps, fought hard in their cloistral schools and in the universities, in which they had still the supremacy. But the new universities, the schools founded especially in England out of the monasteries suppressed by Wolsey, or out of ecclesiastical wealth, as by Bishop Fox, or by Colet, who hated scholasticism as bitterly as Erasmus, were open to the full light of the new teaching. Erasmus served the good cause in two ways; by exposing its barrenness and uselessness in his serious as well as in his satirical writings, and by supplying the want of more simple, intelligible, and profit-able manuals of education. Against the superstitions of the age, the earlier writings of Erasmus are a constant grave or comic protest, though he was not himself always superior to such weaknesses. In his younger days he had attributed his recovery from a dangerous illness to the intercession of St. Genoveva, to whom he addressed an ode. The saint, it is true, was aided by William Cope, the most skilful physician in Paris. When at Cambridge he made a pilgrimage—it may have been from curiosity rather than faith-to our Lady at Walsingham. But his later and more mature opinions he either cared not, or was unable, to disguise. The monks, the authors and supporters of these frauds, are not the objects of his wit alone, but of his solemn, deliberate invective. Severe argument, however, and bitter, serious satire had been heard before, and fallen on comparatively unheeding ears; it was the lighter and more playful wit of Erasmus which threw even the most jealous off their guard, and enabled him to say things with impunity which in graver form had awakened fierce indignation. Even the sternest bigots, if they scented the danger, did not venture to proscribe the works which all Christendom, as yet unfrightened, received with unchecked and unsuspecting mirth. Let the solemn protest as they will, there are truths of which ridicule is the Lydian stone. The laughter of fools may be folly, but the laughter of wise men is often the highest wisdom. Perhaps no satire was ever received with more universal applause, in its day, than the Praise of Folly.' Let us remember that it was finished in the house of More, and dedicated to one who was hereafter to lay down his life for the Roman faith. To us, habituated to rich English humour and fine French wit, it may be difficult to do justice to the 'Moriæ Encomium;' but we must bear in mind that much of the classical allusion, which to us is trite and pedantic, was then fresh and original. The inartificialness and, indeed, the inconsistency of the structure of the satire might almost pass for consummate art. Folly, who at first seems indulging in playful and inoffensive pleasantry, while she attributes to her followers all the enjoyments of life, unknown to the moroser wise, might even, without exciting suspicion, laugh at the more excessive and manifest superstitions-the worship of St. Christopher and St. George, St. Erasmus and St. Hippolytus; at indulgences; at those who calculated nicely the number of years, months, hours of purgatory; those who would wipe off a whole life of sin by a small coin, or who attributed magic powers to the recitation of a few verses of the Psalms. But that which so far is light, if somewhat biting, wit, becomes on a sudden a fierce. and bitter irony, sometimes anticipating the savage misanthropy of Swift, but reserving its most merciless and incisive lashes for kings, for the clergy, for the cardinals and the popes. Folly, from a pleasant, comic merry-andrew, raising a laugh at the absurdities of the age, is become a serious, solemn, Juvenalian satirist, lashing their vices with the thrice-knotted scourge, drawing blood at every stroke, and, as it were, mocking at its prostrate victims. And yet of this work twenty-seven editions were published during the lifetime of the author, and it was translated into many of the languages of Europe. The 'Colloquies' were neither less bold nor less popular; they were in every library, almost in every school. We have alluded to the edition of above 20,000 copies said to have been struck off by one adventurous printer; and yet in these 'Colloquies' there was scarcely a superstition which was not mocked at, we say not with covert, but with open scorn; and this with a freedom which in more serious men, men of lower position in the world of letters, would have raised an instant alarm of deadly heresy, and might have led the hapless author to the stake. In the Shipwreck,' while most of the passengers are raising wild cries, some to one saint, some to another, there is a single calm person, evidently shown as the one true Christian, who addresses his prayers to God himself, as the only deliverer. In the Ichthyophagia,' the eating of fish, there is a scrupulous penitent, whom nothing, not even the advice of his physician, will induce to break his vow, and eat meat or eggs, but who has not the least difficulty in staving off the payment of a debt by perjury. In the Inquisition concerning Faith' there is a distinct assertion, that belief in the Apostles' Creed (which many at Rome do not believe) is all-sufficient; that against such a man even the Papal anathema is an idle thunder, even should he eat more than fish on a Friday. The Funeral' contrasts the deathbed and the obsequies of two men. One is a soldier, 6 who has acquired great wealth by lawless means. He summons all the five Orders of mendicants, as well as the parish priest, to his dying bed. There is a regular battle for him: the parish priest retires with a small share of the spoil, as also do three of the mendicant Orders. Two remain behind: the man dies, and is magnificently buried in the church in the weeds of a Franciscan; having forced his wife and children to take religious vows, and bequeathing the whole of his vast wealth to the Order. The other dies simply, calmly, in humble reliance on his Redeemer: makes liberal gifts to the poor, but bequeaths them nothing; leaves not a farthing to any one of the Orders; receives extreme unction and the Eucharist without confession, having nothing on his conscience, and is buried without the least ostentation. Which model Erasmus would hold up as that of the true Christian, cannot be doubted. In The Pilgrimage' not only is pilgrimage itself held up to ridicule, but reliques also, and even the worship of the Virgin. In the letter, which, by a fiction not without frequent precedent, he ascribes to the blessed 'Deipara,' there is a strange sentence, in which the opinion of Luther, denying all worship of the saints, is slily approved of, as relieving her from a great many importunities and troublesome supplications. The Franciscan Obsequies' is perhaps the finest and most subtle in its satire, |