e Grunnius may have been taken from Jerome's epistles, where
it is a nickname for a certain Ruffinus, whom Jerome disliked very much.
It appears again in a letter of 5 March 1531, LB. X 1590 A.

CHAPTER XII

ERASMUS'S MIND

Erasmus's mind: Ethical and aesthetic tendencies, aversion to
all that is unreasonable, silly and cumbrous--His vision of
antiquity pervaded by Christian faith--Renascence of good
learning--The ideal life of serene harmony and happy
wisdom--Love of the decorous and smooth--His mind neither
philosophic nor historical, but strongly philological and
moralistic--Freedom, clearness, purity, simplicity--Faith in
nature--Educational and social ideas

What made Erasmus the man from whom his contemporaries expected their
salvation, on whose lips they hung to catch the word of deliverance? He
seemed to them the bearer of a new liberty of the mind, a new clearness,
purity and simplicity of knowledge, a new harmony of healthy and right
living. He was to them as the possessor of newly discovered, untold
wealth which he had only to distribute.

What was there in the mind of the great Rotterdamer which promised so
much to the world?

The negative aspect of Erasmus's mind may be defined as a heartfelt
aversion to everything unreasonable, insipid, purely formal, with which
the undisturbed growth of medieval culture had overburdened and
overcrowded the world of thought. As often as he thinks of the
ridiculous text-books out of which Latin was taught in his youth,
disgust rises in his mind, and he execrates them--Mammetrectus,
Brachylogus, Ebrardus and all the rest--as a heap of rubbish which ought
to be cleared away. But this aversion to the superannuated, which had
become useless and soulless, extended much farther. He found society,
and especially religious life, full of practices, ceremonies, traditions
and conceptions, from which the spirit seemed to have departed. He does
not reject them offhand and altogether: what revolts him is that they
are so often performed without understanding and right feeling. But to
his mind, highly susceptible to the foolish and ridiculous things, and
with a delicate need of high decorum and inward dignity, all that sphere
of ceremony and tradition displays itself as a useless, nay, a hurtful
scene of human stupidity and selfishness. And, intellectualist as he is,
with his contempt for ignorance, he seems unaware that those religious
obs