principal place, had little sympathy with the new
classicism, about which their ward already felt enthusiastic, need not
be doubted. 'If you should write again so elegantly, please to add a
commentary', the schoolmaster replied grumblingly to an epistle on which
Erasmus, then fourteen years old, had expended much care. That the
guardians sincerely considered it a work pleasing to God to persuade the
youths to enter a monastery can no more be doubted than that this was
for them the easiest way to get rid of their task. For Erasmus this
pitiful business assumes the colour of a grossly selfish attempt to
cloak dishonest administration; an altogether reprehensible abuse of
power and authority. More than this: in later years it obscured for him
the image of his own brother, with whom he had been on terms of cordial
intimacy.

Winckel sent the two young fellows, twenty-one and eighteen years old,
to school again, this time at Bois-le-Duc. There they lived in the
Fraterhouse itself, to which the school was attached. There was nothing
here of the glory that had shone about Deventer. The brethren, says
Erasmus, knew of no other purpose than that of destroying all natural
gifts, with blows, reprimands and severity, in order to fit the soul for
the monastery. This, he thought, was just what his guardians were aiming
at; although ripe for the university they were deliberately kept away
from it. In this way more than two years were wasted.

One of his two masters, one Rombout, who liked young Erasmus, tried hard
to prevail on him to join the brethren of the Common Life. In later
years Erasmus occasionally regretted that he had not yielded; for the
brethren took no such irrevocable vows as were now in store for him.

An epidemic of the plague became the occasion for the brothers to leave
Bois-le-Duc and return to Gouda. Erasmus was attacked by a fever that
sapped his power of resistance, of which he now stood in such need. The
guardians (one of the three had died in the meantime) now did their
utmost to make the two young men enter a monastery. They had good cause
for it, as they had ill administered the slender fortune of their wards,
and, says Erasmus, refused to render an account. Later he saw everything
connected with this dark period of his life in the most gloomy
colours--except himself. Himself he sees as a boy of not yet sixteen
years (it is nearly certain that he must have been twenty already)
weakened by fever, but nevert