ART. VI. ERASMUS.*

THE pilgrim-scholar, who chances to enter on the Continent by the way of Holland, must be very much wanting in scholarly enthusiasm, if he does not linger a few hours about the quaint old town of Rotterdam, were it only for the sake of breathing the native air of one who, for half a century, was universally acknowledged king in the realm of letters, and of seeing an object which, more vividly than any thing else, places the man himself before the mind's eye. Crowning the centre of the bridge that arches over one of those canals which serve for streets in many of the towns of the Low Countries, and in the great market-square of the place, stands the brazen statue of a man of somewhat short and stooping stature, attired in a study-gown, trimmed with fur, having on his head the academic cap or turban of Sir Thomas More's day, and clasping with his slender fingers a folio volume, over the open pages of which his apprehensive eyes and delicate cheeks seem to hang intently. It is the celebrated Erasmus of Rotterdam.

The huge volume of Erasmus's correspondence, which we have had the pleasure and perplexity of exploring, for the purpose of finding out, if possible, what the man was, contains, as its frontispiece, a bust-engraving of him, under which some ingenious editor† has placed an epigram, that, translated quite literally from the Latin, would run somewhat as follows:

"Of that great man, whose fame the wide world sounds

Thou seest but half within this picture's bounds.

Why not the whole?' Good reader, cease to admire;

Not earth itself could hold the man entire!"

Any one who should see the enormous volume from which this was taken might, indeed, be tempted to query

* 1. Epistolarum D. Erasmi Roterodami Libri XXXI. et P. Melanchthonis Libri IV. Quibus adjiciuntur Th. Mori et Lud. Vivis Epistolæ, una cum indicibus locupletissimis. Londini. Excudebant M. Flesher et R. Young. Folio. pp. 3220. Edition of 1642.

2. Pilgrimages to Saint Mary of Walsingham and Saint Thomas of Canterbury. By DESIDERIUS ERASMUS. Newly translated, with the Colloquy on Rash Vows, by the same Author, and his Characters of Archbishop Warham and Dean Colet, and illustrated with Notes. By JOHN Gough NICHOLS, F. S. A. Westminster: John Bowyer Nichols & Son. 1849. 12mo. pp. 248.

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whether the panegyrist meant to say that the world could not contain the soul of Erasmus, or all that he had written. One thing he would be pretty certain to suspect, that the author of that volume must have been a man of some weight in his generation. "The star of Germany," "the sun of literature," "the prince of letters," "the high-priest of polite learning," "the vindicator of theology," such were among the familiar titles of Erasmus in the mouths of his contemporaries; and it is said that letters were addressed to him with one or another of these superscriptions as their only direction, without the least fear of their miscarrying, because there was but one person in all the world to whom such titles could apply; wherein his correspondents were more safe than the modern Greek boy, who, having been sent to this country for his education, and desiring, on an early visit to his home, to communicate with his teacher, but forgetting his name and address, directed his letter to the American, wherever he might be." A letter to Voltaire as the Frenchman, wherever he might be, would once have been likelier than this boy's to reach its destination. Kings and emperors, cities and universities, popes and philosophers, vied with each other in their devotion to Prince Erasmus; and during nearly the first quarter of the sixteenth century, at least till the outbreak of the Lutheran revolution, his life (says a writer, † whom one might suspect to be a Frenchman, if not informed of the fact) was "a continued series of triumphs.....; an intellectual beatification, made up of feasts and concerts, at which were sung hymns composed in all the dialects of Europe." "King of the literary realm" we called Erasmus; but when we trace the analogy between his fate and that of a certain modern monarch, we are tempted now to describe him as citizen-king of the republican realm of letters.

Erasmus of Rotterdam, "that eternal miracle of nature," (as one of the old editors makes Erasmus's own autobiography commence by calling him,) was born in that town, in the year (according to the inscription on his monument) 1467, though almost as many years contend for the honor of his birth, as there were cities that

“ Πρὸς τὸν ̓Αμερικανον, ποῦ ἂν εἴη.”

† Audin.

claimed to be the birthplace of Homer. He was the natural son of a citizen of that place, named Gerard. Just before the child's birth, his father, in consequence of the opposition made to his marrying by his parents and numerous brothers, (the former for the sake of their pride, and the latter for the sake of the property, insisting upon his entering the Church,)- had fled to Rome, where he maintained himself for a time as a copyist, the art of printing not having reached there, and afterward gave himself to the higher studies. Hearing, shortly, from home that the object of his attachment was dead, for grief he took priestly orders. On returning home, however, he discovered that he had been imposed upon. He found her still living, a mother, and devoted to her child. This child was named Gerard, after his father; but when he grew up, he translated the Dutch name, which means "amiable," into equivalent words, both Greek and Latin, and styled himself Desiderius Erasmus. At the age of four the boy was sent to school, in a few years was employed as a singing-boy in the Cathedral of Utrecht, and at nine was transferred to the high school of Deventer. After three or four years the plague broke out in that region, scattered the school, and sent young Erasmus home, an orphan. His father had left him in the hands of two guardians, who, thinking they could manage the property more to their own satisfaction if the boy could only be put out of the way, tried to persuade him to become a monk, and prevailed upon him, in fact, to connect himself, on probation, with a certain college, called "Friars of Community." There he suffered greatly; "for," he says, "when they found a scholar that was of too high a spirit, and had too much life for a convent, they took more care to check and discourage him by threats and chastisements, than to instruct him in true learning." He returned, sick and sorrowful, to his tutors, who tried all means of getting him to enter the monastery, even hiring people to expostulate with him and threaten him; but, unlike young Luther, he had as little taste for monkery as for music. At last he said he would think of the matter, and on a certain day give them his decision; but when the day came, he made answer, that he had concluded to wait till he should understand better what the world was, what a

monastery was, and what he himself was. Upon this his governors declared they would resign their commission, and leave him to shift for himself, which, he replied, he felt himself abundantly competent to do. At length, however, beset on all sides by friends, foes, and fevers, he yielded to the entreaties of one of his old college chums, who had entered the convent, and went in also, in his sixteenth or seventeenth year, and then and there wrote his first work, on "Contempt of the World.” He certainly had had no great reason to be in love with it yet.

In 1492 he was ordained priest. About that time the Bishop of Cambray, who had hopes of a cardinal's hat, and would have secured it, Erasmus says, if he could have raised the money, was meditating a journey to Rome for the purpose, and invited Erasmus to be his travelling companion and Latin spokesman. The Roman scheme fell through, but still Erasmus went to Paris, the Bishop promising to pay his expenses, which, however, he never did. By this time Erasmus had become so poor that he writes to a friend, "The first money I get I shall devote to the purchase of Greek books, and the next to buying clothes for my back." At Paris he studied divinity. He says, however, he did not fancy the study, or rather he feared it, because he had a presentiment that he should certainly study himself into heresy, and so bring upon himself endless trouble. The metaphysical lectures, too, he found as unpalatable and unwholesome to his mind, as the bad bread and wine were to his bodily system. At the same time the plague, which returned annually for several years, did not allow him to study much, but kept him travelling between France and Holland, with an occasional visit to England. In this last-named country he made many friends, and a singular circumstance, he mentions, made him popular there; namely, that having, on one occasion, (probably as he was about to embark at Dover,) been robbed by certain real or pretended government officers, he not only did not revenge the injury, but came out shortly with a book in praise of the English king and people.

In 1499 he was driven by pestilence to Louvain, where he studied law, and cooled himself, says Father

Dupin, with reading Accursius, Bartholus, and Baldus. He was soon invited to England again by the great promises of the Archbishop of Canterbury, which, however, not being fulfilled to his mind, he made a journey in 1506 to Italy, and there, at Bononia, took the degree of Doctor of Divinity. The way in which he became known to the Pope was singular. Having on his shoulders the white scapulary of the canons regular, he was mistaken in the streets for a plague-doctor, and pursued with stick, stone, and sword. He immediately wrote to the secretary of Julius II., "in an agreeable and pathetic style," old Dupin says, requesting a dispensation from the dangerous obligation of his order, which his Holiness was pleased to grant. He next visited Venice, where he corrected for the press established by the brothers Aldi (the famous printers after whom our Aldine editions are named), and thence passed on, through Padua and Ferrara, to Rome, whither his fame had preceded him. He refused the office of Penitentiary, but accepted a pressing invitation to return to England, whither he went in 1509, and became the guest of Sir Thomas More, at whose house he wrote, and to whom he dedicated, his Encomium Moria, or Praise of Folly, the title suggesting the name of the proper patron for the work. Refusing the offer of a curacy under the Archbishop of Canterbury, in 1510 he crossed over to Paris, whence, however, he soon returned to England, and taught Greek at Oxford and Cambridge. Preferring, however, for some reason unknown to us, visiting England to living there, he soon departed for Bâle, in Switzerland, and thence came round again to the Low Countries, revisiting England now and then, in the few following years, and writing all the time at the taverns where he stopped on his journeys, and sometimes composing on horseback. It was in this period of his life that, after refusing repeated offers from the king of France, he accepted the office of state-councillor to the Archduke Charles of Austria, afterwards Charles V., and took up his residence at Louvain.

The names of Charles V. and Louvain remind us that we are approaching a period of Erasmus's life, when a new kind of plague began to hunt him about from one position to another through the mental regions, as the