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have seen the bashfulness of the schoolboy; but to one who carries a bar sinister on his shield the battle of life is very hard, especially at the beginning; and to this poor youth the world's experiences were becoming somewhat bleak. Like other hunted creatures, his utmost sagacity was needed for self-defence, and he had too much reason to distrust the tutorial trio. In other respects the letter is an admirable composition, and interesting as indicating thus early his turn for proverbial philosophy and love of classical quotation. But neither good Latin nor lines from Ovid could make it palatable to the receiver. He wrote back to his ward that, if he continued to send such figurative effusions, he must subjoin explanatory notes. For his own part, he always wrote plainly and "to the point "-punctuatim.

Instead of the university, Erasmus was sent to a monkish school at Bois le Duc (Hertogenbosch); from which, after an irksome and unprofitable durance of nearly three years, the plague allowed him to escape. Returning to Gouda, he found that by the death of one of their number his guardians were reduced to Winkel the schoolmaster, and a mercantile brother. They had but a sorry account to give of their stewardship; and Erasmus warned his brother that a desperate attempt would assuredly be made to force them into a convent, as the shortest way of winding up the trust and closing the account. Both agreed that nothing could be more alien from their present mood of mind, the elder confessing that he had no love for a religious life, the younger being intent on that scholarship which convents could not give. "Our means may be small," he said; "but let us scrape together what we can, and find our way to some college. Friends will turn up; like many before us, we may maintain ourselves by our own industry, and Providence will aid us in our honest endeavours." "Then," said the other, "you must be spokesman." Nor was t long before the scheme was pro

1 It will be found in Knight's "Life of Erasmus," Appendix, p. iv.

pounded. In a few days Mr. Winkel called; and, after an ample preface, full of affection for them both, and dwelling on all his services, he went on, "And now I must wish you joy, for I have been so fortunate as to obtain an opening for both of you amongst the canons regular." As agreed, the younger made answer, thanking him warmly for his kindness, but saying that they thought it scarcely prudent, whilst still so young, to commit themselves to any course of life. "We are still unknown to ourselves, nor do we know the vocation which you so strongly recommend. We have never been inside of a convent, nor do we know what it is to be a monk. Would it not be better to defer a decision till after a few years spent in study?" At this Mr. Winkel flew, into a passion : "You don't know what you are? You're a fool. You are throwing away an excellent opportunity, which I have with much ado obtained for you. So, sirrah, I resign my trust; and now you are free to look where you like for a living." Erasmus shed tears, but stood firm. "We accept your resignation, and free you from any farther charge.' Winkel went away in a rage; but, thinking better about it, he sought the assistance of his brother, who, not being a schoolmaster, was less in the habit of losing his temper. Next day they invited the young men to dinner. It was beautiful weather; they had their wine taken out to a summer-house in the garden, and under the management of the balmy and blandiloquent merchant all went smooth and merry. At last they came to business, and so engagingly did the man of money set forth the life of poverty-so bright were the pictures of abstinence and seraphic contemplation which he drew over his bottle of Rhenish -that the elder brother was quite overcome. Pretending to yield to irresistible argument, he entered the convent; but he was a thorough rogue, and carried his rascality into the cloister. He cheated even the monks, and with his scandalous misconduct, drinking and stealing, proceeded from bad to worse, and henceforth disappears from history. Erasmus,

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on the other hand, hungering for knowledge and intent on mental improvement, held out. Although he had never lived in a monastery, he had attended a conventual school, and had seen the comatose effect which the cowl exercises on the head of the wearer. "In vain is the net spread in the sight of any bird;" and although the door was open, and nice barley was strewn on the threshold, inside the decoy he saw so many bats and doleful creatures as effectually scared him, and with the instinct of a true bird of Paradise he escaped away to light and freedom.

But it was not easy to resist for ever. He was friendless and penniless. Besides, his health was broken; for nearly a year he had been suffering from paroxysms of quartan ague, and in the wakeful hours of night he began to wonder if it might not be better to renounce the pursuit of learning, and give himself entirely to prepare for eternity. Whilst in this state of feeling he fell in with a youth who had been his schoolfellow at Deventer, and who was now an inmate of the convent of Steene, near Gouda. Cornelius Berden drew a glowing picture of conventual retirement. He enlarged on the peace and harmony reigning within the sacred walls, where worldly strifes and passions never entered, and where, careful for nothing, but serving God and loving one another, the brethren led lives like the angels. Above all, he expatiated on the magnificent library and the unlimited leisure, and so wrought on his younger companion that he consented to come in as a novice. For the first months it was all very pleasant; he was not expected to fast, nor to rise for prayers at night, and every one was particularly kind to the new-comer ; and, although before the year had expired he saw many things which he did not like, and some which awakened his suspicion, he was already within the gates, and it was not easy to get away. If he hinted to any one his fear that neither in mind nor body was he fitted to become a monk, he was at once assured that these were mere temptations of Satan, and, if he would only

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defy the devil by taking the final step, these difficulties would trouble him no The awful word "apostate" was whispered in his ear, and he was reminded how, after thus putting his hand to the plough and turning back, one novice had been struck by lightning, another had been bitten by a serpent, and a third had fallen into a frightful malady. As he afterwards pathetically urges, "If there had been in these fathers "a grain of true charity, would they not "have come to the succour of youth and "inexperience? Knowing the true state "of the case, ought they not to have 'said, 'My son, it is foolish to carry "this effort any farther. You do not 66 agree with this mode of life, nor does "it agree with you. Choose some "other. Christ is everywhere-not here only ;-and in any garb you may live "religiously. Resume your freedom:

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so shall you be no burden to us, nor "shall we be your undoing.' But with these anglers it was not the custom when they had hooked a fish to throw him back into the water. They worked on his generous and sensitive spirit by asking, How can you as a renegade ever lift up your head amongst your fellowmen And in pride and desperation he did as had been done by his father before him he pressed his hands tight over his eyes and took the fatal leap. At the end of the year he made his profession as a canon regular in the Augus tinian Convent of Emmaus at Steene.

It was not long before his worst forebodings were fulfilled. In the cloisters of Emmaus he found no Fra Angelico nor Thomas à Kempis, nor any one such as the name of the place might have suggested no one who cared to "open the Scriptures," or who said to the Great Master, "Abide with us." From the genius of the place both religion and scholarship seemed utterly alien. The monks were coarse, jovial fellows, who read no book but the Breviary, and who to any feast of the Muses preferred pancakes and pots of ale. There was a library, but it was the last place where you would have sought for a missing brother. They sang their matins and

vespers, and spent the intermediate time in idle lounging and scurrilous jesting. Long afterwards, when invited to return, Erasmus wrote to the prior that his only recollections of the place were "flat and foolish talking, with"out any savour of Christ, low ca"rousals, and a style of life in which, "if you stripped off a few formal "observances, there remained nothing "which a good man would care to "retain." 1 At his first entrance his disposition was devout; but he wanted to worship: it was the living God whom he sought to serve, and the genuflexions, and crossings, and bell-ringings, and changes of vestments seemed to him little better than an idle mummery. He had hoped for scholarlike society, but, except young Hermann from Gouda, he found none to sympathize in his tastes, or join in his pursuits. Nor did the rule of his Order agree with him. His circulation was languid, his nervous system extremely sensitive. If called up to midnight devotions, after counting his beads and repeating the prescribed pater-nosters, a model monk would turn into bed and be asleep in five seconds; but, after being once aroused from his rest, Erasmus could only lie awake till the morning, listening to his more fortunate brethren as they snored along the corridor. For stock-fish his aversion was unconquerable. Sir Walter Scott mentions a brother clerk in the Court of Session who used to be thrown into agonies by the scent of cheese, and the mere smell of salted cod Erasmus a headache. And whilst by a bountiful supper his capacious colleagues were able to prepare overnight for the next day's fast, to the delicate frame of our scholar abstinence was so severe a trial that he repeatedly fainted away. No wonder then that with the love of letters, the love of reality, and the love of liberty superadded to such constitutional inaptitudes, the "heaven on earth" at Steene soon became an irksome captivity.

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1 66 Colloquia quam frigida, quam inepta, quam non sapientia Christum; convivia quam laica; denique tota vite ratio, cui si detraxeris ceremonias, non video quid relinquas expetendum." Opp. iii, 1527.

Not that the five years were utterly lost. True, he was disappointed in Cornelius Berden, the quondam chum whose glowing representations had first inveigled him. In the outset he was delighted with his apparent classical ardour, and rejoiced to burn with him the midnight oil, reading through a whole play of Terence at a single sitting. But it turned out that his motive was pure selfishness. He was ambitious of preferment, and, with the astuteness which he had learned during a short sojourn in Italy, he had entrapped into the convent his accomplished friend, as the cheapest way of obtaining a tutor. No wonder that, as soon as his treachery was detected, the victim bitterly resented his baseness. But, as we have already stated, in William Hermann he still found a kindred spirit. In poetical compositions and elegant Latinity they vied with one another, and any ancient treasure which either discovered they shared in common. Where the predisposition or susceptibility exists, a book read at the right time often gives an abiding complexion to the character, or a life-long direction to the faculties. The delight with which Pope when a schoolboy read Ogilby's Homer resulted in our English Iliad; and the copy of the "Faery Queen," which Cowley found on the window-seat of his mother's room, committed him to poetry for the rest of his days. In the same way Alexander Murray used to ascribe the first awakening of his polyglottal propensities to the specimens of the Lord's Prayer in many tongues which he found in Salmon's Geography, and our pleasant friend James Wilson was made a naturalist by the gift of "Three Hundred Wonderful Animals." A tendency towards scholarship our hero inherited from his father, along with his mirth and humour; and a peculiar flavour was given to his wit, as well as a tincture to his style, by his early admiration of Terence. And in the convent of Steene he found two writers who exerted a material influence on his subsequent history. One of these was Jerome, in whose letters he found such spoil that he transcribed the

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whole of them; and of many subsequent years it became the chosen pastime, as well as absorbing employment, to prepare for the press the collected works of this truly learned father. The other was the famous Italian, Laurentius Valla, whose Elegancies of the Latin Language" did so much to restore to modern times the speech of ancient Rome, and whose detection of the forgery which assigned the city of the Cæsars to Sylvester as a gift from Constantine may be regarded as the first decisive blow aimed at the temporal power of the Papacy.1 His critical acumen, and the skill with which he explained the niceties of a noble tongue, filled Erasmus with rapture, and the very truculence of the terrible Roman had a charm for his ardent disciple.2 Not that their dispositions were at all akin. Mild in his very mischief, and never so indignant as to be indiscreet, Erasmus was not born to be either a cynic or a bully; but in minds capable of unreserved admiration there is an isomorphous tendency, and, although the constituent elements may be distinct, the style into which they crystallize becomes identical. And, just as Hannah More could not help writing Johnsonese, as many a living writer nibs his pen and cuts the paper with Carlylian rhodium, so in the inspiration of our author we can sometimes detect the spell of a first love and an unconscious imitation of Valla. As a scholar and critic he was eventually no whit inferior; as a wit and a genius he immeasurably excelled. Yet through his subsequent career may be discerned the influence of 1 Unless we give precedence to Dante :"Ahi Costatin, di quanto mal fu matre Non la tua conversion, ma quella dote Che da te prese il primo ricco patre!" Inferno, canto 19. "Ah Constantine! what evils caused to flow, Not, by conversion, but those fair domains Thou on the first rich Father didst bestow!" Wright.

Valla was born at Rome in 1407, where also in 1457 he died. His declamation against the Popedom did not see the light till long after his death, viz. 1492, about the time when Erasmus was taking leave of Steene.

2 See his 1st, 2d, and 103d Epistles.

his Italian predecessor, not only in his preference of classical Latinity at large to a narrow and foppish Ciceronianism; not only in the keen-eyed shrewdness and audacious sense which saw through the frailties of popes and the flaws of tradition; not only in the courage which set to work to translate the Greek Testament anew, undaunted by the awful claims of the Vulgate; but in the vituperative energy which he threw into his later polemical writings, and which is not unworthy of the critic who was constantly snapping at the heels of Poggio, and who had nearly torn Beccadelli in pieces because his remarks on Livy had gained the best bon-bons at Alphonso's table.

If Steene had few rewards for its students, the restraints were not very strict which it placed on its inmates. As long as they did not interfere with the rules of the Order, they were allowed to follow freely their own tastes and likings. We have mentioned that our Desiderius had a musical voice, and that when a little boy he was a chorister in Utrecht Cathedral. For the sister art of painting he is also said to have shown an early inclination, and a painted crucifix has come down with the inscription, "Despise not this picture: it was painted by Erasmus when he lived in the convent of Steene."1 Anecdotes are also current of other modes in which he occasionally enlivened his graver studies. For instance, it is told that there was a pear-tree in the orchard which monks of low degree were warned to leave untouched; for the prior had seen meet to reserve it for his own proper use. Our friend, however, having taken a private survey of the forbidden fruit, was obliged to own that in this instance his superior was right, and repeated his visits so often that the pears began to disappear with alarming rapidity. The prior determined if possible to find out the robber. For this purpose he took up

1 What has become of it we cannot tell. In the early part of last century it belonged to Cornelius Musius of Delft. Burigny, Vie d'Erasme, tome i. p. 37.

his position overnight at a window which commanded the orchard. Towards morning he espied a dark figure in the tree; but, just as he made sure of catching the scoundrel, he was obliged to sneeze, and at the explosion the thief dropped from the bough, and with admirable presence of mind limped off, imitating to the life the hobble of the only lame brother in the convent. As soon as the monks were assembled for morning prayers, the prior enlarged on the dreadful sin which had been committed, and then in a voice of thunder denounced the lame friar as the sacrilegious villain who had stolen the pears. The poor monk was petrified. Protestations of innocence and proofs of an alibi were unavailing; the prior with his own eyes had seen him in the fact, and we doubt if the real delinquent came forward to discharge the penance.

Erasmus had spent five years in the convent when Henri de Bergues, the Bishop of Cambray, invited him to become his secretary. The bishop was aspiring to a cardinal's hat; and, having resolved on a journey to Rome in order to secure it, he wisely judged that the accomplished Latinist, whose fame had already come to France, would materially subserve his purposes. On the other hand, Erasmus was transported at the prospect of exchanging the society of boorish monks for the refinement and scholarship which he expected to find at the head-quarters of the Church and in the metropolis of Italy; and, as both Prior Werner and the Bishop of Utrecht gave their consent, somewhere about the year 1492 Erasmus took his joyful departure from Steene, and returned no more.

In its treatment of Erasmus, monasticism prepared its own Nemesis. The system was become a scandal to Europe. The greed of the friars, their indolence, their hypocrisy, their gluttony and grossness, had been for ages proverbial, and it was only with the sulky toleration of inevitable evil that their swarming legions were endured. Still it was believed that celibacy was a holy state, and it was hoped that, by way of balance to the rough exactions and tavern brawls

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Erasmus had no reason to love the institution. By working on the religious feelings of his grandparents and the avarice of their older sons, it had prevented his father from consummating in lawful wedlock an honourable attachment, and so had brought on his own birth a reproach with which the real authors of the wrong were the first to stigmatize him. And it had gone far to frustrate his own existence. Years which should have been given to letters and to religion it had doomed to dull routine and meaningless observance; nor was it unnatural that he should resent on the system the craft and chicanery which had cozened him out of his liberty, and which, in lieu of the philosopher's cloak, had left him in a fool's cap and motley. It can therefore occasion no wonder that 11 subsequent years he let slip no opportunity for showing up the ignorance and heartlessness of the regular clergy. If in one aspect Luther's life was one long war with the devil, the literary career of Erasmus was a continued crusade against monkery; and it is almost amusing to notice how, whether it be any mishap which has befallen himself, or any evil which threatens the universe, if it be a book of his own which is anonymously abused, or the peace of a family which is invaded, or a town or kingdom which is hopelessly embroiled-he is sure to suspect a friar as the source of the mischief; and, as we read page after page of his epistles, we cannot help forming the conclusion that, "going to and fro on the face of the earth," the ubiquitous monk was to all intents our author's devil.

The years during which they kept him imprisoned at Steene supplied the materials for thoroughly exposing the system. He was then filling his portfolio with

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