powerful men at Rome. He also met Cardinal de' Medici, later Clement VII.1

Of the venality of the papal court he saw something. He knew a man who made his living by fraudulent dealing in benefices and had once cheated an applicant for an Irish bishopric, by making him pay for an appointment to a see that was not vacant.2 Erasmus must have seen many of the relics, mostly spurious and often absurd, with which the Holy City was filled, for his works are full of allusions to such things. He witnessed the blasphemies, and also the levities, indulged in by unworthy priests. On Good Friday, 1509, he heard a sermon delivered by the celebrated Latinist, Inghirami,1 nominally on the death of Christ, but really stuffed with fulsome flattery of Julius II, served up in the purest Ciceronian rhetoric. The preacher, who neither understood nor cared for his solemn subject, delighted only to exhibit his learning by comparing the Saviour in turn to Curtius, to Cecrops, to Aristides, and to Iphigenia.

A severe moral judgment is occasionally expressed in the Dutchman's allusions to Rome.5 The town was full of demi-mondaines, some of whom lived in splendor, like Greek Hetaeræ, the friends of great men, and the objects of poets' adulation. They often took classical names, as Imperia, Polyxena, or Penthesilea. It was perhaps with an eye to one of them, or possibly to the scandalous repute of Lucretia Borgia, that Erasmus gave the name Lucretia to the harlot of one of his Colloquies. In this same dialogue the woman expresses

1 Letter of Medici to Aleander, autumn, 1521, instructing Aleander to treat Erasmus considerately. Balan: Monumenta Reformationis Lutheranæ, 1884, no. 53; Lämmer: Monumenta Vaticana, 1861, pp. 1 ff.

De Lingua, LB. iv, 711.

LB. i, 732C.

Ciceronianus, LB. i, 993 f; cf. Rodocanachi, p. 138. A portrait of Inghirami by Raphael is at Fenway Court, Boston, Massachusetts.

'LB. iv, 483. Praise of Folly. Nichols, ii, 6 ff.

LB. i, 718 ff. On these women see E. Rodocanachi: Courtisanes et Bouffons, *1894.

the opinion that all men who visit Rome are made worse thereby, and the youth who is talking to her replies that he, personally, has been saved by the New Testament of Erasmus.

Although the Italian jealousy of foreigners later gave rise to the rumor that Christopher Longueil, who was copying manuscripts, was paid by Erasmus and Budé to rob Rome of her literary treasures,' the northern scholar speaks well of his opportunities for study. His literary work in the Holy City, however, was confined to the composition of two orations, one in favor of making war on Venice, and one against that policy, both written at the express desire of Cardinal Riario for the pope. Though the author put more heart into the plea for peace, the other won the day.2

Of his general impression of Rome, Erasmus wrote three years later to his friend Robert Guibé, a Breton resident in the city:

Had I not torn myself from Rome, I could never have resolved to leave. There one enjoys sweet liberty, rich libraries, the charming friendship of writers and scholars, and the sight of antique monuments. I was honored by the society of eminent prelates, so that I cannot conceive of a greater pleasure than to return to the city.3

Before setting his face northward Erasmus, probably in April, made a short visit to Naples, of which the only incident preserved is his inspection of the Grotto di Posilipo, on the road from Naples to Cumæ. In one place he calls it a cave of pirates, though named after the Sibyls, and describes the walls as covered with shells. Elsewhere he speaks of its darkness and of the

1 Pastor: History of the Popes, English transl. ed. by Kerr, viii, 228 f. This was in 1518-19.

2 Catalogue of Lucubrations, Allen, i, p. 37. In 1468 Bishop Roderic Sancius of Zamora and Bartholomew Platina held a debate at Rome on a similar subject, the former speaking for war, the latter for peace. G. Butler: Studies in Statecraft, 1920, p. 14.

Allen, ep. 253.

Allen, ep. 604, 2 note.

Б

Adagia, LB. ii, no. 4120.

light of the entrance, shining in the distance like a star.1 A famous Neapolitan known to him, though perhaps not until later, a man to whom he wrote of the libraries at Naples, was John Peter Caraffa, founder of the Theatine Order, and later pope as Paul IV.2

That Erasmus did not settle in Italy was due to the high hopes of preferment held out to him by English friends on the accession of Henry VIII to the throne on May 22, 1509. The event was announced to him by Mountjoy in words implying that the golden age of learning was about to dawn, and that the new Henry would be not only Octavus, but Octavius. The young prince, he said, only wished he were more learned, and promised to cherish all scholars, on the ground that "without them we should hardly exist at all." Erasmus's hopes of profiting by the esteem of a prince whom he already knew were increased by a letter from Warham seeming to promise something definite.' He therefore hastened north, calling on Bombasius at Bologna sometime before September 28th,5 and giving him an eloquent account of his expectations. He crossed the Splügen to Chur, thence to Constance and Strassburg, and so down the Rhine to Antwerp. After a short visit at Louvain he proceeded to England."

1 Allen, ep. 756.

⚫ Allen, epp. 377, 640; i, p. 550.

Allen, ep. 215.

Allen, ep. 214.

Nolhac: Les Correspondants d'Alde Manuce, 1888, p. 84; Nichols, i, p. 465; Allen, i, p. 452.

• Allen, ep. 266; Nichols, ii, p. 84.

7 Rhenanus to Charles V, Allen, i, p. 62; Nichols, i, p. 32.

CHAPTER V

THE

THE PRAISE OF FOLLY

HE most widely read, though not the most important, work of Erasmus, the one which gave him an immediate international reputation, was The Praise of Folly, written just after his return from Italy, while he was waiting in More's house for the arrival of his books and was suffering from an attack of lumbago.1 Something of the spirit and intention of the Folly is revealed in the dedicatory epistle to More:

On returning from Italy . . . I chose to amuse myself with the Praise of Folly (Moria). What Pallas, you will say, put that into your head? Well, the first thing that struck me was your surname More, which is just as near the name of Moria or Folly as you are far from the thing itself, from which, by general vote you are remote indeed. In the next place I surmised that this playful production of our genius would find special favor with you, disposed as you are to take pleasure in a jest of this kind, that is neither, unless I mistake, unlearned nor altogether inept. . . . For, as nothing is more trifling than to treat serious questions frivolously, so nothing is more amusing than to treat trifles in such a way as to show yourself anything but a trifler.

...

This last sentence gives the key to the Folly. It is a witty sermon, an earnest satire, a joke with an ethical purpose. Satire of this peculiar flavor, mockery with a moral, was characteristic of the age. How much of it there is in Luther, how much in Hutten, how much in Rabelais, how much in the Epistles of Obscure Men!

1 Allen, epp. 337; 222; Nichols, epp. 317 (ii, p. 5), 212. The Encomium Moria is printed LB. iv, 381 ff; also see Stultitia Laus Des. Erasmi Rot. Recognovit et adnotavit I. B. Kan. 1898. Many editions of the English versions; see The Praise of Folly, written by Erasmus 1509, translated by J. Wilson, 1668, ed. by Mrs. P. S. Allen, 1913.

Erasmus probably had many of the earlier satirists in mind, though he mentions as literary sources only classical models, beginning with the Batrachomyomachia. He speaks particularly of Lucian, the author of dialogues on the fly, on the parasite, and on the ass, and of course Erasmus's careful study and translation of this author contributed to his own mastery of the ironic style. But there were certainly works nearer his own time which also influenced him. If he would have scorned the barbarous Goliardic songs, which contain a vast amount of mockery directed against the Church, he would have felt much less repulsion for the works of Poggio and Aretino, both of whom wrote Facetia with many a shrewd blow directed at superstition and human foibles. He knew them both, as well as Skelton, the English wit. At Rome he must have become acquainted with one of the famous vehicles of caricature and lampoon, the statue of Pasquin, from which the word " pasquinade" is derived. In 1501 there had been dug up there a statue lacking nose, arms, and part of the legs, which was then believed to be a Hercules, but is now known to represent Menelaus carrying the body of Patroclus. This statue was set up by its discoverer, Cardinal Oliver Caraffa, in the Piazza Navona, near a shrine to which a procession was annually made on the day of St. Mark the Evangelist (April 25th). The gaiety of the Roman populace, seeing something absurd in the mutilated statue, began on these holidays to dress up in a travesty of some antique deity or hero. Thus, in 1509, when Erasmus may well have been present, the fragment was decked out to represent Janus, in allusion to the war that had broken out with Venice. The immense publicity given to the statue gradually led to its being used as a convenient billboard for posting lampoons for the people, deprived of power, sought revenge on their masters by heaping them with ridicule, thus tempering despotism with epigram. Finally the statue was named Pasquin after a citizen particularly

it