him the living of Aldington, in
Kent; but whether Erasmus was wanting in making his court to Wolsey,
or whether the cardinal viewed him with a jealous eye, because he was
a favourite of Warham, between whom and Wolsey there was perpetual
clashing, we know not; however, being disappointed, Erasmus went
to Flanders, and by the interest of Chancellor Sylvagius, was made
counsellor to Charles of Austria, afterward Charles V., emperor of
Germany. He resided several years at Basil; but on the mass being
abolished in that city by the Reformation, he retired to Friberg
in Alsace, where he lived seven years. Having been for a long time
afflicted with the gout, he left Friberg, and returned to Basil. Here
the gout soon left him, but he was seized by a dysentery, and after
labouring a whole month under that disorder, died on the 22nd of July,
1536, in the house of Jerome Frobenius, son of John, the famous printer.
He was honourably interred, and the city of Basil still pays the highest
respect to the memory of so great a man.

Erasmus was the most facetious man, and the greatest critic of his age.
He carried on a reformation in learning at the same time he advanced
that of religion; and promoted a purity of style as well as simplicity
of worship. This drew on him the hatred of the ecclesiastics, who were
no less bigotted to their barbarisms in language and philosophy, than
they were to their superstitious and gaudy ceremonies in religion; they
murdered him in their dull treatises, libelled him in their wretched
sermons, and in their last and most effectual efforts of malice, they
joined some of their own execrable stuff to his compositions: of which
he himself complains in a letter addressed to the divines of Louvain. He
exposed with great freedom the vices and corruptions of his own church,
yet never would be persuaded to leave her communion. The papal policy
would never have suffered Erasmus to have taken so unbridled a range
in the reproof and censure of her extravagancies, but under such
circumstances, when the public attack of Luther imposed on her a
prudential necessity of not disobliging her friends, that she might with
more united strength oppose the common enemy; and patiently bore what at
any other time she would have resented. Perhaps no man has obliged the
public with a greater number of useful volumes than our author; though
several have been attributed to him which he never wrote. His book of
Colloquies has passed t