CHAPTER XI FAMILIAR COLLOQUIES--NEW TESTAMENT PARAPHRASES--CONTROVERSIAL AND DIDACTIC WRITINGS--REMOVAL TO FREIBURG--LAST REFORMATORY TREATISES--RETURN TO BASEL--DEATH 1523-1536

With all Erasmus' anxiety to demonstrate in words his entire independence of the rapidly organising reform parties and his unswerving loyalty to the papacy, his action during these critical years was as far as possible from timidity or half-heartedness. Of this no better proof can be given than the repeated editions of his Familiar Colloquies. The Colloquies, like the Adages, have a history of their own. They were begun, probably, as early as the residence of Erasmus in Paris,[166] about the year 1500, and consisted at first of brief conversations on familiar subjects, arranged for the use of beginners in Latin.

As years went on, these early experiments were extended, partly by expansion, partly by addition. In 1523-24 appeared an edition, practically complete, with a charming little dedication to the author's namesake, John Erasmius Froben, the eight-year-old son of the publisher. This dedication, we have a right to believe, represents fairly the serious thought of Erasmus as to the real meaning and purpose of his book.[167]

The Colloquies were written to instruct by amusing. They touch upon every class of society and upon every vice and weakness of human nature. Some are sparkling with humour, some are too plainly didactic to be very amusing, and some, especially the later ones, are downright dull. As in the Praise of Folly, the sermon is heard through all the rush of words and no one of these tales is quite without its moral lesson. The subjects most welcome to Erasmus' satire are of course the extravagances of monks and schoolmen and the superstitions of religion. We have already quoted freely from some of the more important for the knowledge of the writer's own life. A brief survey of one or two of the more widely popular will indicate the great range of interest and the keen human desire which commended them to so large a circle of readers.

In The Abbot and the Learned Lady we have one of several proofs that Erasmus regarded the education of women as desirable and profitable to the community. The abbot reproves the lady because he finds Latin books in her chamber. French or German he could bear with, but not Latin.

The Youth and the Harlot brings us to perhaps the best illustration of that freedom of language which was the most common charge against the Colloquies. The argument is one employed previously by the Saxon nun Roswitha in the tenth century in her comedy Paphnutius. An edition of Roswitha had been published at Nuremberg in 1501, so that Erasmus may well have taken his model at first-hand. The conversation is of the slipperiest, and yet the impression conveyed is not that of immoral or even of unmoral writing. It is simply the baldest "realism" of treatment, and the issue is distinctly a moral one. As in Roswitha the erring woman is won to virtue by the Christian faith, so here she is reformed by arguments of a more practical sort. The dig at the monks is not lacking. The youth has been on a journey to Rome:

The Colloquies became the especial object of attack from all who cared to assail the reputation of Erasmus. Typical was the action of the Paris theological tribunal, the Sorbonne, which in 1526 condemned the book as dangerous to the morals of the young, and worse still as containing the same errors as the works of Arius, Wiclif, the Waldensians, and Luther. In presenting their case to the supreme court, the "Parlement" of Paris, for its action, the theologians of the Sorbonne review the steps already taken by the spiritual authorities toward the suppression of the Colloquies. They had done what they could, but now demand the aid of the temporal powers. King Francis I. appears to have opposed the action of the Parlement, and it was not until 1528 that the University as a body condemned the book and forbade its students to read it.

Equally unfavourable was Luther's judgment of the Colloquies. In his Table-Talk he refers frequently to them as the most offensive to him of all Erasmus' writings.[168]

Another product of the years of greatest party stress were the Latin Paraphrases of the New Testament books. No one of the serious works of Erasmus was so widely influential as this. Erasmus began his work on them immediately after the first publication of the New Testament in 1516, and continued it at intervals during the next seven or eight years. The timeliness of the Paraphrases is shown by their immediate translation into the common tongues. Erasmus himself says that they brought him very little odium, but abundant thanks. In a preface addressed to the "Pious Reader"[169] he makes an ample and admirable defence of bringing the Bible to the people both in the form of paraphrases and of translations. "I greatly differ," he says, "from those who maintain that the laity and the unlearned should be kept from the reading of the sacred volumes, and that none should be admitted to these mysteries except the few who have spent years over the philosophy of Aristotle and the theology of the schools."

There are two ways to this end: either all men must learn "the three tongues," or else the Scriptures must be translated. Erasmus makes the somewhat startling suggestion that, as the energy of the Roman princes had compelled all the world to speak Greek and Latin, merely to maintain their temporal Empire, it was quite within the bounds of possibility for the princes of Christendom to compel all men to learn Hebrew, Greek, and Latin that the eternal kingdom of Christ might be spread over the whole earth. However, he realises that this is not likely to happen very soon and meanwhile will be content if each may know the Scripture in his own tongue:

Our limits forbid us to go in detail into the several long and bitter controversies in which Erasmus found himself engaged with the defenders of the ancient faith. They begin with the publication of his New Testament and continue for twenty years with little interruption. They were without exception undertaken by unofficial persons, representing the governing powers of neither Church nor State. It was Erasmus' constant boast that all the really important elements of European life were on his side and that the attacks upon him were only so many reflections upon the highest authorities themselves. There is truth enough in this boast to make it evident that these controversies were a private matter between himself and his immediate opponents; but it was plain also that at any critical moment the powers that were might be enlisted against him.

The charges which caused him most anxiety may be reduced to two. First, the accusation of scholarly inaccuracy, and second, the far more difficult and wide-reaching accusation of heresy with all its multitudinous meanings. As to the former charge of inaccurate scholarship, Erasmus had two forms of defence. Sometimes he admitted it and sought to explain it away by alleging hasty work and defending himself by readiness to accept correction and to prepare new editions of the faulty texts. He liked to represent himself as a pioneer, breaking the way for others more learned than himself and, he would venture to hope, stimulated to better things by his example. Or, again, he would deny the truth of the criticism and would then proceed to demonstrate at great length and, with all the amenities common to literary controversy in his day, to demolish the contentions of his opponent. In these discussions of purely literary and scholarly themes, where his antagonists were really men of some consideration, he kept his argument in the main to a reasonably high standard. Where, however, they seemed to him men of small account he descends to unmeasured personal abuse.

In the other kind of controversy called out by his attacks upon ignorant and vulgar superstitions or upon the excesses of clerical abuse, his method was somewhat different. Here he was always ready to repay slander by slander, to exaggerate the personal element both in attack and defence, and especially to insist that he was absolutely sound in his doctrinal beliefs. To the former class of controversies belong notably that with Edward Lee, later archbishop of York, called out by the early edition of the New Testament, that with BudÆus, which was a liberal give-and-take of sharp criticism on purely literary matters, and that with the Spaniard Stunica. To the latter class belong such wranglings as his dealings with Natalis Bedda of Paris, Nicholas Egmund of Louvain, and Gerhardt of Nymwegen, the reformed preacher of Strassburg.

This controversial literature gives us but little insight into the real thought of Erasmus. Its value for us is only in furnishing us with evidence of his astonishing cleverness in winding his way out of difficulties and his immense command of the language of vituperation. Its study leaves one with an unpleasant sense of powers diverted for the time from their most profitable exercise into issues which did not tell with any great effect upon the final result of the scholar's life.

The anxiety of Erasmus as to the reception of his works begins to show itself from about the year 1526 in his dealing with the person and the probable fate of Louis de Berquin. The story of this first martyr to the reformed faith in France reflects better than any other episode the course of events and ideas in the early stages of the reformatory movement there. Berquin was a gentleman of Artois, a man of liberal education, serious in his character, and moved from the start to apply his learning to the remedy of obvious abuses in the clerical life. Through LefÈvre he was led to the study of the Lutheran leaders and became convinced that here he had found the true way to liberty and recovery from the low condition of the dominant religion. Like Erasmus he attacked principally those errors and abuses which seemed to rest mainly upon ignorance and superstition in those to whom the world had a right to look for learning and enlightenment. The scholars of the Sorbonne, the heads of the French ecclesiastical fabric and the leaders of French monasticism, were at once alarmed. They began, early in the movement of the reform, to bring every possible pressure upon the young, enlightened, and would-be liberal king to act promptly and with decision against these first threatening demonstrations of what they were ready instantly to stamp as "heresy." For six years, from 1523 to 1529, Berquin was subjected to one stage after another of a persecution which he was too brave to avoid. His chief offence in the eyes of his theological persecutors was that he had studied and translated into French, with "blasphemous" commentaries, several of the most dangerous writings of Erasmus and other alleged leaders of sedition. Twice arrested and imprisoned, he was twice released by the special order of the king, who seems to have taken his case very much to heart. Meanwhile were occurring that series of unhappy events,—the Italian campaign of 1525, the capture of Francis I., the treaty of Madrid, and the negotiations following it,—which were driving the king inevitably into the hands of the French clerical party. To save his kingdom and his "honour" he was forced to make sacrifices, and a ready victim was found in this man, who had defied the powers which were now clamouring for a royal edict of persecution. The king withdrew his protection and Berquin died upon the scaffold on the 17th of April, 1529.

The relations of Erasmus with Berquin began by a letter from the latter written in 1526 and expressing the greatest admiration for the learning and services to true religion of the man to whom he looked up as his chief example. He assures Erasmus that the main object in persecuting him had been to throw suspicion upon Erasmus' own works; but that he had assured his judges that if anything in these works seemed contrary to the faith it was the result of misunderstanding or perversion of the original text. He exhorts Erasmus to write, not casually, as he has already done to Bedda, but at length, with arguments and with the authorities from Scripture, to refute these calumnies.

This letter of Berquin[170] is a noble and touching appeal. Not a word of complaint or of fear for himself, though he had just for the second time barely escaped from the clutches of enemies who were determined to destroy him. He appeals to Erasmus, not in his own behalf, but in behalf of that truth which he found above all in the writings of the man he was glad to call his master.

The reply[171] was as brief and cold as could well be.

Two later letters[172] have the same tone of petulant self-interest and cold indifference to the fate which he predicts if Berquin does not moderate his attacks.

After Berquin's death he wrote to Pirkheimer,[173] giving an account of the affair as he had heard it, and added:

The same story is repeated, with more detail, in a letter to Utenhoven.[174]

In these letters there is not a word of real sympathy with the fate of a man whose worst fault was the publication of Erasmus' own writings! Not a word of honest admiration for his courage—only a grudging admission that he was an honest fellow, but really too obstinately determined upon ruining himself! Worst of all is the shabby pretence that Erasmus had not really looked into the case of Berquin and after all was not quite sure whether he had deserved his punishment or not. Of all the triumphs of the Erasmian "If," none is more complete or more significant than this.

For several years, from about 1523 on, Erasmus had been engaged in personal controversy with individual theologians at Paris; but it was not until 1525 that the Sorbonne Faculty as a body was brought to act in the premises. A decree of that year condemned certain passages in the translations of several of Erasmus' books. In 1526 another attack was made especially against the Familiar Colloquies and the Paraphrases of the New Testament. The former were definitely prohibited to students who were candidates for degrees. The decree of the Faculty was arranged under thirty-two headings, each concerning some special point of alleged divergence from the true teaching of the Church. In his reply,[175] published in 1529, Erasmus takes up these points one by one and fills over seventy printed folio pages with specific answers. As to the style of his defence we are prepared to anticipate it. His method is precisely that of Berquin,—to declare that he is true to the real doctrine of the Fathers and that his critics—not, of course, the learned Faculty itself—are those who are in error. How these charges can really come from the Faculty as a whole he cannot comprehend, but he proposes to appeal from the Faculty asleep to the Faculty awake. He has made errors: to err is human. But why condemn as error in him what the greatest lights of the Church have said without reproof? When Augustine is praising virginity he goes a little far in dispraise of marriage; is it strange if Erasmus in defending marriage has seemed to have too little respect for virginity?

We are not for a moment to suppose that the real audience to which this reply was addressed was the Faculty of Paris asleep or awake; it was the reading world. A more splendid advertisement for the Colloquies than this theological prosecution could hardly be imagined. Erasmus says[176] that a certain Parisian publisher, upon the rumour, "perhaps started by the publisher himself," that the Colloquies were about to be condemned, got out an elegant handy edition of twenty-four thousand, and that it was at once in everyone's hands.

In England, where Erasmus might have expected to find his best defenders and his most sympathetic readers, the Colloquies were condemned in the same year (1526) as at Paris.

A work which brought much later reproach upon its author was the Institution of Christian Marriage, written in 1526 and dedicated to Queen Katherine of England. Our interest in it is in the bearing upon marriage of the changes in public sentiment wrought by the Reformation; and especially in that whole great problem of the relation between marriage as the foundation of human society and the whole monastic and priestly limitation of it. Erasmus reaches this point after a long and systematic review of the canonical regulations as to marriage. He examines first the evil effect upon society of the entrance into the monastic life of persons already under the obligations of marriage, a thing which he says was never favoured even in times most kindly disposed towards monasticism itself unless with full consent of the other party.[177] That Erasmus had not entire confidence even in the supervision of marriage by the most responsible ecclesiastical authorities is shown by a striking passage[178] in which he foreshadows the principle of civil marriage:

The great body of the essay is taken up with admirable injunctions as to the conduct of married life and the education of children. Erasmus avoids here any consideration of what was becoming one of the burning questions of the day, the right of "reformed" monks or priests to enter into lawful marriage, but returns at the very close to the relation between marriage and the clerical life. The burden of his thought here is the duty of parents and all concerned to make sure that the youth proposing either to take orders or to become a monk shall be quite clear as to his calling and perfectly free to follow it or not.[179] Throughout this very attractive dissertation there is a noticeable calmness of style, joined, however, with entire clearness and decision upon the essential points. It is one of the best illustrations of Erasmus' lifelong insistance upon the higher value of the life of nature as compared with any life of mere formalism.

That Erasmus' silence on the question of clerical marriage was not due to lack of thought on the subject is clear from a letter to C. Hedio, Lutheran preacher at Strassburg in 1524, two years before the treatise on Christian Marriage.[180]

Erasmus recognises the need of reform in every detail; he professes agreement with every view of the reformers, but he will not advocate any specific action, because it will open up some new outlet for human frailty. To follow him would be to condemn the world, once for all, to hopeless inactivity, simply because the world's business must be done by finite human beings.

One naturally compares with this elaborate defence of natural and wise living, in the Christian Marriage, another treatise also written two years earlier, dedicated to the sisters of a nunnery near Cologne and called A Comparison of the Virgin and the Martyr.[181] The good ladies, it seems, had frequently sent Erasmus presents of confectionery and had begged him to write something for them,—a very pious desire, he says, but a poor choice of a man. He only wishes that he could find in the fragrant stories of Holy Writ something to refresh their minds as their little gifts have refreshed his body. So he runs on with a page or two of pretty fancies about virginity and then, in equally fanciful strain, about martyrdom. On the whole, virginity has the advantage.

Comparing the spouse of Christ with the spouse of a mortal husband, Erasmus dilates upon the vast superiority of the virgin state. If one is not willing to believe this from the evidence of learned men, let her

This was written at the very time at which Erasmus was giving to the world the completed text of his Colloquies! How shall we explain these apparent contradictions? Precisely as we have explained the account of the monastic life in the De Contemptu Mundi.[182] Like that earlier essay, this too was a piece of literary display, written, not to rouse opposition, but out of a largely conventional impulse. We need not question for a moment the entire sincerity of Erasmus in this kind of composition, as far as it went. It was only the natural instinct of the man to counterbalance every opinion he uttered and every effect he produced by putting forth something on the other side of the same question—for every question has two sides. There were doubtless purely conducted monasteries, and Erasmus was bound to believe that the pleasant ladies who were kind enough to feed him with candy were examples to their kind. To suppose, however, that the phrases of ecstatic spiritual joy here offered came from very deep down in his heart of hearts would place the spirit of Erasmus in closer kinship with Bernard and À Kempis than we should quite like to put it.

During precisely these years, from 1522 to 1529, we have a great number of treatises, generally short, which illustrate this more devotional and spiritual phase of his literary activity. A characteristic specimen is the Modus Orandi Deum, "On the True Way of Prayer,"[183] addressed to Gerome À Lasco, a Polish baron and brother of the better-known John À Lasco. This is a systematic inquiry into the nature, the purpose, and the limitations of Christian prayer. It examines the questions: to whom we may pray, what we may properly pray for, and how our prayers should be framed. In regard to the first question, Erasmus discusses with great skill some of the most delicate problems of his day. He examines authorities on both sides as to the propriety of prayers to Christ and concludes:

More difficult was the question of the invocation of saints. Erasmus works his way up to a conclusion by a series of carefully prepared stages. True, we ought to affirm dogmatically only such things as are plainly declared in the Holy Scriptures; but we ought to respect everything that has been handed down with the approval of pious men. Now we know that the invocation of saints was practised by very early orthodox Christians, therefore, while we cannot say that it is a necessary article of faith, we may well bear with it. We know that the saints when on earth were called upon to pray for other men; why suppose them less capable of praying for us now that they dwell with God in heaven?

As to the proper objects of prayer Erasmus makes a very elaborate analysis,[184] but brings everything round finally to the standard of the Lord's Prayer. The method is almost scholastic in its system and its logical division, but it is eminently sensible and practical in its content.

To illustrate the folly of absurd distinctions as to which divinities might attend to which prayers, he tells a story of a certain man at Louvain, simple rather than impious, who, after he had made his devotions, used to run about among the various altars, saluting the saints for whom he had an especial liking, and saying: "This is yours, St. Barbara," and "Take this to yourself, St. Rochus," as if he feared that the saints would fall to fighting over the special prayers belonging to each.

A very modern, almost "evangelical" touch is found in a chapter on extempore prayer.

We have here an almost complete survey of the outward forms of the religious life reduced to the simple standard of Christian common sense. As a type of Erasmus' activity at this time nothing can serve us better. He was fulfilling his mission as a preacher of simple righteousness, and no clamours of criticism on the one side or the other of the great conflict raging about him could drive him for a moment from his fundamental position. He watched all the stages of that struggle and drew out of the views of the several parties the text for his continuous comment upon men and things. He held himself, as he said, integer, "uncompromised," but he shows where his real feeling was. The ruling order might get what comfort it could out of the Modus Orandi and similar treatises, but if the suggestions therein contained could have been carried out, a something very like the Protestant churches would have resulted. The authority of Scripture as the standard of religious life; the Lord's Prayer as the all-sufficient test of the forms of worship; the laity as the essential element of the Christian community; the common language as the only proper medium of communication in religious matters; a worship of secondary powers so enfeebled by the limits of common sense that it would surely fall away of itself—all this makes a programme that is nothing less than Protestant in its essence. Stripped of its academic decorations and its elaborate balancing of values, this was a reforming tract of the first importance.

Of course Erasmus used all the trimming portions, both of this and of all similar writings, to demonstrate his loyalty to tradition, but the modern reader, like the "Lutheran" of that day, must see through these to the real thought beneath and must share his impatience that the man who could go so far could not be brought to take a step farther and carry out these suggestions—or at least help others to carry them out—into definite constructive action. The reply must always be that the world has no right to demand of any man what is not his to give.

So in alternations of calm religious reflection and composition with violent controversial encounters, of painstaking scholarly editing with keenest satirical writing, the residence of the aging scholar at Basel drew to its end.

---

In the year 1529 Erasmus left Basel and went to Freiburg in the Breisgau. Why he left Basel and why he chose Freiburg as his residence are questions we can hardly hope to answer satisfactorily, since they involve that whole very difficult subject of his personal equation, to which we have not yet discovered any sufficient key. Perhaps we may say this: that Basel had been an attractive residence for him because its political and religious condition corresponded pretty accurately to his own state of mind. The spirit of the place was eminently one of toleration and good feeling. Even the violent doctrines of the extreme radical party, the Anabaptists and all their kin, were heard with patience, but were held in check and not allowed to influence public action. If we could trust the extravagant eulogy common just after his death[185] we should have to think of Erasmus living at Basel as a kind of intellectual monarch, to whom

This is obvious nonsense; but we gain enough glimpses at his manner of life at Basel to make us sure that Erasmus lived there in honour, with every opportunity for congenial work and for association with men of his own kind. His ordinary habits were those of a sober scholar who was compelled by the natural demands of his profession and by the limitations of feeble health to keep strictly within the limits of careful and quiet living. He seems to have surrounded himself with young men, table-boarders, who came to him as the adviser of their studies. His relation to them is very prettily sketched in a letter[186] to a young Frisian, one Haio Caminga, who had applied for a place at his table. He gives the young man fair warning that he will find a table set with learned conversation rather than with choice delicacies,—as far from luxury as the table of Pythagoras or Diogenes. The great productivity of this period would of itself be sufficient evidence of a regular and quiet life. Nor need we doubt that a great many visitors were led to Basel by curiosity or sympathy to make the personal acquaintance of the famous scholar.

One feels at once that this was just the atmosphere for Erasmus. His only real grievance at Basel seems to have been his dread that he might be held accountable for the opinions of someone with whom he did not entirely agree. In the course of time, however, this condition of unstable equilibrium grew more and more untenable. The actual "Reformation" of the place could not be averted, and rather than remain in a distinctly Protestant community Erasmus broke off all his happy associations and wandered away again. He takes infinite pains to assure everyone that he was not driven away, that he went openly and with the good will of all concerned. His account of the religious revolution shows that it was a very temperate kind of revolution indeed. His friendly feelings are neatly expressed in a bit of verse which he says he jotted down as he was entering his boat to depart.

At Freiburg he was well received by the magistracy and given a sufficiently splendid lodging in an unfinished palace of the Emperor Maximilian. He has, of course, doubts about his health, but thinks he will stay a year, unless he is driven away by wars. In fact he kept pretty well until the spring of 1530, when he was attacked by a new and painful development of the disease from which he had so long been suffering.

The references to this illness of 1530 occur generally in connection with some allusion to the great Diet of Augsburg in that year. Erasmus says that he was asked to go to this Diet by many leading men, but expressly states that he was not asked by the emperor. His illness gave him an excuse for not going. He says that he could have done no good at Augsburg and we certainly need no assurance of his to make this quite clear to us. By 1530 affairs had moved on far beyond the point where the only advice he had ever had to give, namely "be good and wise, and all our troubles will end at once," could be of any service. In the years from 1525 to 1529 the whole North of Germany had become welded into a solid mass of resistance to the Roman Catholic system. The Lutheran Reformation had passed the stage of negative criticism and had entered upon that of constructive organisation.

Once more we have to ask: Where was there room for poor Erasmus? It was a pleasant fiction for him, in his comfortable quarters at Freiburg, to imagine that he was really wanted at Augsburg, but who in the world could have wanted him? The time for his "ifs" and "buts" was past and the moment had come when men were ready to set all they held dear upon the hazard of a doubtful war. The Diet at Augsburg obeyed the emperor and renewed the formal condemnation of Luther and his works. The Protestant princes promptly replied by the League of Schmalkalden. Their attitude was simply one of readiness, not of aggression. For the time it answered, and delayed the actual outbreak of hostilities until long after the death of Erasmus.

It is evident that Erasmus had little faith in the Diet. He writes to John Rinckius[187]:

Then follows a minute description of his recent illness and again allusions to his personal troubles.

It is evident that Erasmus saw clearly the danger of the imperial position. His shrewd sense told him that Charles was very far from grasping the real extent of the German resistance. He writes to Campeggio[188]:

No more clever summary of the situation than this can be imagined; and yet the only practical suggestion in it, that some principle of toleration for the sects might be discovered is a complete denial of everything for which Erasmus pretended to stand. It would have been a recognition of the right of revolution, and that was the one horror which haunted all his dreams.

Indeed it was the irony of fate that the man who had spent his early manhood in open attacks upon the Roman system, and his maturer years in trying to make his peace with Rome, should now in his old age find his really virulent critics on the side of the ancient faith. The "sects," as he always contemptuously called them, were quite content with the actual service he had done them and were only too eager to claim him for their own. The one orthodox fold, in which he steadfastly protested he belonged, was continually producing men who made his life a burden with their reproaches.

As long as the Diet at Augsburg lasted, Erasmus continued to assure his correspondents that he was under the orders of the emperor not to leave Freiburg as he had intended to do. Then the winter began and with it the ravages of the plague, "nova lues, formerly peculiar to Britain, but suddenly spreading over all nations." Why he should have been detained at Freiburg against his will he gives no intimation, and, indeed, the whole story, appearing in letter after letter, seems to show only his annual restlessness and desire to say why he did not do something different from what he was doing. At one moment he thinks he must go to France to get some wine. They say it is a dreadful thing to die of hunger, but he really believes it is worse to die of thirst. He really must get some drinkable wine.

During the summer of 1531 he went so far as to write to the magistrates of BesanÇon, saying that even before leaving Basel he had thought of moving to their city and now when Freiburg is beginning to be a dangerous place, his thoughts are turning thither again.

Freiburg was plainly growing less attractive—or, let us say, was furnishing more and more occasions of complaint. He had spent nearly two years in the abandoned palace of Maximilian without knowing, if we may believe his own story, whether he was the guest of the city, or whether he was hiring the house wholly or in part, or, if he was hiring it, who his landlord was or what he was to pay. When, after two years, he was called upon to move at the end of three months and to pay back rent for a year and a half, he affects to be overwhelmed with surprise and indignation, and writes a two-column letter to the Provost of Chur, at the far east end of Switzerland, to explain.[189] The result was that he took the hasty, and, as it seems to have appeared to himself, somewhat absurd step of buying a house. He naturally begins the letter, in which he tells this news to John Rinckius, with an enumeration of the disagreeables at Freiburg and ends it by declaring that the house shall not keep him there if things go as he wishes. His account of the affair may serve us as an illustration of the unconquerable humour with which he faced life to the last.[190]

"But now here is something for you to laugh at. If anyone should tell you that Erasmus, now nearly seventy, had taken a wife, wouldn't you make the sign of the cross three or four times over? I know you would, and small blame to you. Now my dear Rinckius, I have done a thing no less difficult and burdensome and quite as foreign to my tastes and habits. I have bought a house, a fine one enough, but at a very unfair price. Who shall now despair of seeing rivers turn about and run up-hill, when Erasmus, who all his life has made everything give place to learned leisure, has become a bargain-driver, a buyer, a giver of mortgages, a builder and, in place of the Muses, is now dealing with carpenters and workers in iron, in stone, and in glass. These cares, my dear Rinckius, which my soul has always abhorred, have just about bored me to death. So far I am a stranger in my own house, for, though it is spacious enough, there is not a nest in it where I can safely trust my poor body. One chamber I have built with an open fireplace and have boarded it, floor and sides, but on account of the plastering I have not yet dared to trust myself in it."