ithin reach in Europe since the fall of the
Roman Empire. Henceforth it was no longer the clergy alone, and an
occasional literate, but a numerous multitude of sons of burghers and
nobles, qualifying for some magisterial office, who passed through a
grammar-school and found Erasmus in their path.

Erasmus could not have attained to his world-wide celebrity if it had
not been for Latin. To make his native tongue a universal language was
beyond him. It may well puzzle a fellow-countryman of Erasmus to guess
what a talent like his, with his power of observation, his delicacy of
expression, his gusto and wealth, might have meant to Dutch literature.
Just imagine the _Colloquia_ written in the racy Dutch of the sixteenth
century! What could he not have produced if, instead of gleaning and
commenting upon classic Adagia, he had, for his themes, availed himself
of the proverbs of the vernacular? To us such a proverb is perhaps even
more sapid than the sometimes slightly finical turns praised by Erasmus.

This, however, is to reason unhistorically; this was not what the times
required and what Erasmus could give. It is quite clear why Erasmus
could only write in Latin. Moreover, in the vernacular everything would
have appeared too direct, too personal, too real, for his taste. He
could not do without that thin veil of vagueness, of remoteness, in
which everything is wrapped when expressed in Latin. His fastidious mind
would have shrunk from the pithy coarseness of a Rabelais, or the rustic
violence of Luther's German.

Estrangement from his native tongue had begun for Erasmus as early as
the days when he learned reading and writing. Estrangement from the land
of his birth set in when he left the monastery of Steyn. It was
furthered not a little by the ease with which he handled Latin. Erasmus,
who could express himself as well in Latin as in his mother tongue, and
even better, consequently lacked the experience of, after all, feeling
thoroughly at home and of being able to express himself fully, only
among his compatriots. There was, however, another psychological
influence which acted to alienate him from Holland. After he had seen at
Paris the perspectives of his own capacities, he became confirmed in the
conviction that Holland failed to appreciate him, that it distrusted and
slandered him. Perhaps there was indeed some ground for this conviction.
But, partly, it was also a reaction of injured self-love. In Holland
people