Erasmus still looked like that, he would take a wife at
once'. It is that deep trait of dissatisfaction that suggests the
inscription on his portraits: 'his writings will show you a better
image'.

Erasmus's modesty and the contempt which he displays of the fame that
fell to his lot are of a somewhat rhetorical character. But in this we
should not so much see a personal trait of Erasmus as a general form
common to all humanists. On the other hand, this mood cannot be called
altogether artificial. His books, which he calls his children, have not
turned out well. He does not think they will live. He does not set store
by his letters: he publishes them because his friends insist upon it. He
writes his poems to try a new pen. He hopes that geniuses will soon
appear who will eclipse him, so that Erasmus will pass for a stammerer.
What is fame? A pagan survival. He is fed up with it to repletion and
would do nothing more gladly than cast it off.

Sometimes another note escapes him. If Lee would help him in his
endeavours, Erasmus would make him immortal, he had told the former in
their first conversation. And he threatens an unknown adversary, 'If you
go on so impudently to assail my good name, then take care that my
gentleness does not give way and I cause you to be ranked, after a
thousand years, among the venomous sycophants, among the idle boasters,
among the incompetent physicians'.

The self-centred element in Erasmus must needs increase accordingly as
he in truth became a centre and objective point of ideas and culture.
There really was a time when it must seem to him that the world hinged
upon him, and that it awaited the redeeming word from him. What a
widespread enthusiastic following he had, how many warm friends and
venerators! There is something naive in the way in which he thinks it
requisite to treat all his friends, in an open letter, to a detailed,
rather repellent account of an illness that attacked him on the way back
from Basle to Louvain. _His_ part, _his_ position, _his_ name, this more
and more becomes the aspect under which he sees world-events. Years will
come in which his whole enormous correspondence is little more than one
protracted self-defence.

Yet this man who has so many friends is nevertheless solitary at heart.
And in the depth of that heart he desires to be alone. He is of a most
retiring disposition; he is _a recluse_. 'I have always wished to be
alone, and there is nothing I hate so