he published nothing openly on their deaths.1 When, shortly before his death, he heard of the reaction in England and of the execution of Anne Boleyn, who had been claimed by the Protestant party, Erasmus wrote to his informant: "You tell prodigies of England. Would that these things had been found out before those good men had been put to death!"

Sick at heart and "almost killed with cares," Erasmus now prepared to leave Freiburg. A trying personal experience, the theft of many of his valuables, united with the clamor of the monks and theologians to drive him from that town,3 to which he never wanted to return again. The house which he had bought for 624 gold florins, and on which he had spent much for repairs, for floors, and for glass windows, he sold, on October 30, 1535, to one Peter Ryd.

When he returned to Basle in the summer of 1535 he was warmly greeted by the university with a gift of hippocras, malvoisie, and other spiced wines, and saluted by a delegation of professors. The only untoward incident was due to the heartiness of the handshake he received from Oporinus, which was so cordial that it made him cry out with pain. After just a year in his old home, while superintending some printing, he met his death from an attack of dysentery. On June 6, 1536,7 he knew himself to be dying, though the end did not come until the night of July 11th-12th. His last words

1 Damian a Goes to Erasmus, Padua, January 26, 1536; LB. App. ep. 331. 2 Erasmus to Schetz, Basle, June 1, 1536; extract published by A. Roersch: "Quarante-six lettres inédites d'Erasme," in Mélanges offerts à M. E. Picot, tome I, 1913, p. 10.

To John Choler, Pentas epistolarum, [pub. by Vesenmeyer], 1798, p. 4, dated September 9, 1533.

Erasmus to L. Ber, Basle, September 12, 1535, pub. in Zentralblatt für Bibliothekswesen, Band 38, 1921, pp. 100 f.

Say $1,400, or £280.

6 T. Burckhardt-Biedermann: "Die Erneuerung der Universität zu Basel 1529-39," Beiträge zur vaterlandische Geschichte, N. F., iv, 1896, p. 428.

Letter to Tiedemann Giese, in Bibliotheca Warmiensis oder Literaturgeschichte des Bisthums Ermland, 1872, p. 103, note 38.

were: "O Mother of God, remember me!" "Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy upon me! I will sing the mercy and judgment of the Lord!" These were repeated over and over again until with his last breath the dying man said in the Low German of his childhood, "Lieber Gott" ("Dear God"), and expired. A splendid funeral was accorded him by the magistrates and men of note at Basle. He was laid to rest in the cathedral, and a stone statue was placed in a public square to commemorate him.4

1 This according to the testimony of his Belgian secretary, Lambert Coomans. See Bulletin de l'Académie Royale de Belgique, tome 9, 1842; F. Nève: La Renaissance des Lettres et l'Essor de l'Érudition en Belgique, 1890, p. 28.

2 On Erasmus's removal to Basle, to Tomitz, August 31, 1525; Lond. xxvii, 25; LB. ep. 1287. On his death: Stromer to Spalatin (July 15?), 1536, Horawitz: Erasmiana, ii, no. 11, p. 608. Amerbach to Spalatin, July 11, 1536, K. & W. Krafft: Briefe und Dokumente aus der Zeit der Reformation, p. 75. Boniface Amerbach to Alciat, April 4, 1537; Burckhardt-Biedermann: Bon. Amerbach und die Reformation, p. 310; Herwagen to Rhenanus, July 17, 1536, Briefwechsel des Beatus Rhenanus, hg. von Horawitz und Hartfelder, no. 296; Rhenanus to Hermann of Wied, August 15, 1536, Allen, i, pp. 53 f. Stromer to Oswald Lasan, 1536, in Zeitschrift für kirchliche Wissenschaft und kirchliches Leben, v, 103 (1885), and the same in Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte, xxvi, 138 (1905).

3 Fynes Moryson: Itinerary, 1907, i. 59 f.

Bartholomew Sastrow saw the tomb here in 1549. Social Germany in Luther's Time, translated by Vandam, 1902, p. 264.

AS

CHAPTER XV

THE GENIUS OF ERASMUS AND HIS PLACE

IN HISTORY

S the living man is known by the company he keeps, so the mind of the great dead can be surely placed by observing the character of those among posterity who praise and follow and of those who depreciate and detest him. It is fitting and natural that, whereas the hunt of obloquy and misunderstanding which pursued Erasmus during his last years continued for generations after his death among the partisans of either side, on the other hand his work and character have received the most cordial recognition from liberal-minded and rational Protestants, and from not a few of the less militant freethinkers. His truest disciples have been found neither among those who sacrificed reason at the altar of faith, nor among those who cast off piety together with superstition and dogma, but among the seekers for reason in religion and for a culture emancipated from the bondage of the past but not ungrateful to the precious heritage of the ages.

After his works had been burned and banned by various Catholic countries,' after he had been branded at the Council of Trent as a Pelagian and an impious heretic,2 his writings were officially prohibited by the Church, now

1 Colloquies were prohibited in Franche-Comté on July 15, 1535; the Moria, the Paraphrases and the De Conscribendis Epistolis on March 8, 1537; see L. Febvre: Notes et Documents sur l'Inquisition en Franche-Comté, 1912, pp. 178, 183. His works would have been prohibited in Belgium in 1540 but for Cardinal Granvella, Enders xiii, 222; they were burned at Milan January 29, 1543, Briefwechsel des Beatus Rhenanus, p. 488.

2 P. Sarpi: Histoire du Concile de Trent, traduite en Français par Amelot de la Houssaie, 1699, pp. 159, 224.

in part, now altogether. The Spanish Inquisition first forbade the reading of the Folly, of the Epistles, of the Paraphrases of the Gospels, and of the Refutations of Luther, and then proceeded, in the words of Milton, "to rake through his entrails with a violation worse than the tomb," publishing, in the Expurgatorial Index of 1584, a list of passages to be deleted from his works on account of error, a list so long that it filled fifty-five quarto pages. But even this was found insufficient; the enumeration of his errors in the Expurgatorial Index of 1640 swelled to fifty-nine double-columned folio pages.1 Rome soon followed the lead of Spain. In 1559 Paul IV not only put Erasmus in the first class of forbidden authors, made up of those all of whose works were condemned, but added after his name: "All his commentaries, notes, criticisms, colloquies, epistles, translations, books, and writings, even if they contain absolutely nothing against religion or about religion." A Commission of the Council of Trent relaxed this censure slightly by prohibiting the Colloquies, the Folly, the Tongue, the Institution of Christian Marriage, the Italian translation of the Paraphrase to Matthew, and all other works on religion until expurgated by the Sorbonne. As this included the Adages, there was little left, and in fact he was treated practically as an author of the first class. His friends, Rhenanus, Wicel, and Zasius, were also put on the Index, apparently more because of their connection with him than for any other reason.

While some Catholic doctors, like Raynaldus, labored to justify the censure of the Church by proving Erasmus an atheist, others felt his charm and tried to save what fragments they could from the wreck of his anathematized remains. The Jesuits particularly learned the value of his educational treatises; one of the greatest of them, Peter Canisius, avowing that the man had deserved well

1 H. C. Lea: Chapters from the Religious History of Spain, 1890, p. 42.

2 F. H. Reusch: Der Index der Verbotenen Bücher, 1883, i, pp. 347-367; H. C. Lea, op. cit. pp. 34 ff.