heless resolute and sensible in refusing.
He has persuaded his brother to fly with him and to go to a university.
The one guardian is a narrow-minded tyrant, the other, Winckel's
brother, a merchant, a frivolous coaxer. Peter, the elder of the youths,
yields first and enters the monastery of Sion, near Delft (of the order
of the regular Augustinian canons), where the guardian had found a place
for him. Erasmus resisted longer. Only after a visit to the monastery of
Steyn or Emmaus, near Gouda, belonging to the same order, where he found
a schoolfellow from Deventer, who pointed out the bright side of
monastic life, did Erasmus yield and enter Steyn, where soon after,
probably in 1488, he took the vows.

CHAPTER II

IN THE MONASTERY

1488-95

Erasmus as an Augustinian canon at Steyn--His friends--Letters
to Servatius--Humanism in the monasteries: Latin poetry--
Aversion to cloister-life--He leaves Steyn to enter the
service of the Bishop of Cambray: 1493--James Batt--
_Antibarbari_--He gets leave to study at Paris: 1495

In his later life--under the influence of the gnawing regret which his
monkhood and all the trouble he took to escape from it caused him--the
picture of all the events leading up to his entering the convent became
distorted in his mind. Brother Peter, to whom he still wrote in a
cordial vein from Steyn, became a worthless fellow, even his evil
spirit, a Judas. The schoolfellow whose advice had been decisive now
appeared a traitor, prompted by self-interest, who himself had chosen
convent-life merely out of laziness and the love of good cheer.

The letters that Erasmus wrote from Steyn betray no vestige of his
deep-seated aversion to monastic life, which afterwards he asks us to
believe he had felt from the outset. We may, of course, assume that the
supervision of his superiors prevented him from writing all that was in
his heart, and that in the depths of his being there had always existed
the craving for freedom and for more civilized intercourse than Steyn
could offer. Still he must have found in the monastery some of the good
things that his schoolfellow had led him to expect. That at this period
he should have written a 'Praise of Monastic Life', 'to please a friend
who wanted to decoy a cousin', as he himself says, is one of those naive
assertions, invented afterwards, of which Erasmus never saw the
unreasonable quality.

He found at Steyn a fair degree of freedo