sive term for all that is old and rude is
already Gothic, Goths. The term barbarism as used by Erasmus comprised
much of what we value most in the medieval spirit. Erasmus's conception
of the great intellectual crisis of his day was distinctly dualistic. He
saw it as a struggle between old and new, which, to him, meant evil and
good. In the advocates of tradition he saw only obscurantism,
conservatism, and ignorant opposition to _bonae literae_, that is, the
good cause for which he and his partisans battled. Of the rise of that
higher culture Erasmus had already formed the conception which has since
dominated the history of the Renaissance. It was a revival, begun two or
three hundred years before his time, in which, besides literature, all
the plastic arts shared. Side by side with the terms restitution and
reflorescence the word renascence crops up repeatedly in his writings.
'The world is coming to its senses as if awaking out of a deep sleep.
Still there are some left who recalcitrate pertinaciously, clinging
convulsively with hands and feet to their old ignorance. They fear that
if _bonae literae_ are reborn and the world grows wise, it will come to
light that they have known nothing.' They do not know how pious the
Ancients could be, what sanctity characterizes Socrates, Virgil, and
Horace, or Plutarch's _Moralia_, how rich the history of Antiquity is in
examples of forgiveness and true virtue. We should call nothing profane
that is pious and conduces to good morals. No more dignified view of
life was ever found than that which Cicero propounds in _De Senectute_.

In order to understand Erasmus's mind and the charm which it had for his
contemporaries, one must begin with the ideal of life that was present
before his inward eye as a splendid dream. It is not his own in
particular. The whole Renaissance cherished that wish of reposeful,
blithe, and yet serious intercourse of good and wise friends in the cool
shade of a house under trees, where serenity and harmony would dwell.
The age yearned for the realization of simplicity, sincerity, truth and
nature. Their imagination was always steeped in the essence of
Antiquity, though, at heart, it is more nearly connected with medieval
ideals than they themselves were aware. In the circle of the Medici it
is the idyll of Careggi, in Rabelais it embodies itself in the fancy of
the abbey of Theleme; it finds voice in More's _Utopia_ and in the work
of Montaigne. In Erasmus's