wanted Erasmus to remain in order to write more for him. Till December
he continued to work at Venice on editions of Plautus, Terence, and
Seneca's tragedies. Visions of joint labour to publish all that classic
antiquity still held in the way of hidden treasures, together with
Hebrew and Chaldean stores, floated before his mind.

Erasmus belonged to the generation which had grown up together with the
youthful art of printing. To the world of those days it was still like a
newly acquired organ; people felt rich, powerful, happy in the
possession of this 'almost divine implement'. The figure of Erasmus and
his _[oe]uvre_ were only rendered possible by the art of printing. He
was its glorious triumph and, equally, in a sense, its victim. What
would Erasmus have been without the printing-press? To broadcast the
ancient documents, to purify and restore them was his life's passion.
The certainty that the printed book places exactly the same text in the
hands of thousands of readers, was to him a consolation that former
generations had lacked.

Erasmus is one of the first who, after his name as an author was
established, worked directly and continually for the press. It was his
strength, but also his weakness. It enabled him to exercise an immediate
influence on the reading public of Europe such as had emanated from none
before him; to become a focus of culture in the full sense of the word,
an intellectual central station, a touchstone of the spirit of the time.
Imagine for a moment what it would have meant if a still greater mind
than his, say Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, that universal spirit who had
helped in nursing the art of printing in its earliest infancy, could
have availed himself of the art as it was placed at the disposal of
Erasmus!

The dangerous aspect of this situation was that printing enabled
Erasmus, having once become a centre and an authority, to address the
world at large immediately about all that occurred to him. Much of his
later mental labour is, after all, really but repetition, ruminating
digression, unnecessary vindication from assaults to which his greatness
alone would have been a sufficient answer, futilities which he might
have better left alone. Much of this work written directly for the press
is journalism at bottom, and we do Erasmus an injustice by applying to
it the tests of lasting excellence. The consciousness that we can reach
the whole world at once with our writings is a stimulant wh