ulture, though it would be strange that, prone as he was to
disparage his schools and his monastery, he should not have mentioned
the fact. Moreover, we know that the humanistic knowledge of his youth
was not exclusively his own, in spite of all he afterwards said about
Dutch ignorance and obscurantism. Cornelius Aurelius and William Hermans
likewise possessed it.

In a letter to Cornelius he mentions the following authors as his poetic
models--Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Juvenal, Statius, Martial, Claudian,
Persius, Lucan, Tibullus, Propertius. In prose he imitates Cicero,
Quintilian, Sallust, and Terence, whose metrical character had not yet
been recognized. Among Italian humanists he was especially acquainted
with Lorenzo Valla, who on account of his _Elegantiae_ passed with him
for the pioneer of _bonae literae_; but Filelfo, Aeneas Sylvius,
Guarino, Poggio, and others, were also not unknown to him. In
ecclesiastical literature he was particularly well read in Jerome. It
remains remarkable that the education which Erasmus received in the
schools of the _devotio moderna_ with their ultra-puritanical object,
their rigid discipline intent on breaking the personality, could produce
such a mind as he manifests in his monastic period--the mind of an
accomplished humanist. He is only interested in writing Latin verses and
in the purity of his Latin style. We look almost in vain for piety in
the correspondence with Cornelius of Gouda and William Hermans. They
manipulate with ease the most difficult Latin metres and the rarest
terms of mythology. Their subject-matter is bucolic or amatory, and, if
devotional, their classicism deprives it of the accent of piety. The
prior of the neighbouring monastery of Hem, at whose request Erasmus
sang the Archangel Michael, did not dare to paste up his Sapphic ode: it
was so 'poetic', he thought, as to seem almost Greek. In those days
poetic meant classic. Erasmus himself thought he had made it so bald
that it was nearly prose--'the times were so barren, then', he
afterwards sighed.

These young poets felt themselves the guardians of a new light amidst
the dullness and barbarism which oppressed them. They readily believed
each other's productions to be immortal, as every band of youthful poets
does, and dreamt of a future of poetic glory for Steyn by which it would
vie with Mantua. Their environment of clownish, narrow-minded
conventional divines--for as such they saw them--neither acknowledge