strife a joy to his soul. "The prison is broken," he cried, "the captive is free and will return no more to bondage." " O century when studies bloom and spirits awake, it is happiness to live in thee! "
Strauss thought the Epistolae a supreme work of art, named them "eine weltgeschichtliche Satire" and placed them alongside Don Quixote, since they were pervaded by so excellent a humour as to be higher and better than any merely satirical production. There is here ground for ample and radical differences, but on one point there is none-the success of the satire. It deceived the very elect; the friars who were satirised saw the truth of the portrait and did not feel its shame, even though the men of serious mind, who could not be deceived, were offended. Erasmus did not love it; nor did Luther, who said " Votum probo, opus non probo" and named the author "einen Hanswurst"; but it made the Schoolmen ridiculous, and while they were laughed at Reuchlin was applauded. He died in 1522, six years after the Epistolae had appeared -the same year in which Luther published his New Testament- sorrowing over the lapse from the Church and from letters of his young kinsman, Melanchthon, and over the coming revolution which yet had in him a plain prophet and a main cause.
In 1516, two years after the first volume of the Epistolae, Erasmus' Novum Instrumentum appeared. The man himself we need neither discuss nor describe. He was a humanist, that is, his main interest was literature; but his humanism was German; that is, the literature which mainly interested him was religious. In an age of great editors he was the most famous; but he was not a thinker, nor a man who could seize or be seized by large ideas and turn them into living and creative forces. His greatest editorial achievements were connected not with the classics, where his haste and his agility of mind made him often a faithless guide, but with the New Testament and the Fathers of the Church. Religion he loved for the sake of letters rather than letters for the sake of religion. He had a quick eye, a sharp pen, a fine humour, and could hold up to man and society a mirror which showed them as they were. He was fastidious and disliked discomfort, yet he could make it picturesque and amusing. His letters are like a crowded stage on which his time lives for ever; and we can hear and see even as his ear heard and as his eye saw. We are, indeed, never allowed to forget that he is a rather too self-conscious spectator; and that while all around him men differ and he is a main cause of their differences, yet there is nothing he more desires than to be left alone to live as untroubled as if he had no mind. He is "so thin-skinned that a fly would draw blood"; yet, or possibly therefore, he is a good hater, especially of the ignorant mob, the obtuse and vulgar men who could not see or feel the satire within the compliment or the irony hidden in an ambiguous phrase.
He is one of the men whose unconscious revelations of himself have a nameless charm; we see him as a student whose very circumstances
