picture of Erasmus
acquires the features with which it was to go down to posterity. Only at
Basle--delivered from the troublesome pressure of parties wanting to
enlist him, transplanted from an environment of haters and opponents at
Louvain to a circle of friends, kindred spirits, helpers and admirers,
emancipated from the courts of princes, independent of the patronage of
the great, unremittingly devoting his tremendous energy to the work that
was dear to him--did he become Holbein's Erasmus. In those late years he
approaches most closely to the ideal of his personal life.

He did not think that there were still fifteen years in store for him.
Long before, in fact, since he became forty years old in 1506, Erasmus
had been in an old-age mood. 'The last act of the play has begun,' he
keeps saying after 1517.

He now felt practically independent as to money matters. Many years had
passed before he could say that. But peace of mind did not come with
competence. It never came. He never became truly placid and serene, as
Holbein's picture seems to represent him. He was always too much
concerned about what people said or thought of him. Even at Basle he did
not feel thoroughly at home. He still speaks repeatedly of a removal in
the near future to Rome, to France, to England, or back to the
Netherlands. Physical rest, at any rate, which was not in him, was
granted him by circumstances: for nearly eight years he now remained at
Basle, and then he lived at Freiburg for six.

Erasmus at Basle is a man whose ideals of the world and society have
failed him. What remains of that happy expectation of a golden age of
peace and light, in which he had believed as late as 1517? What of his
trust in good will and rational insight, in which he wrote the
_Institutio Principis Christiani_ for the youthful Charles V? To Erasmus
all the weal of state and society had always been merely a matter of
personal morality and intellectual enlightenment. By recommending and
spreading those two he at one time thought he had introduced the great
renovation himself. From the moment when he saw that the conflict would
lead to an exasperated struggle he refused any longer to be anything but
a spectator. As an actor in the great ecclesiastical combat Erasmus had
voluntarily left the stage.

But he does not give up his ideal. 'Let us resist,' he concludes an
Epistle about gospel philosophy, 'not by taunts and threats, not by
force of arms and injustice, b