serable tragedy was only what was to be expected from the moral
cowardice which seemed ingrained in the character of the great
Humanist leader. Erasmus had already begun to fight shy of the
Reformation movement, from which he was about to separate himself
definitely. He seized the present opportunity to quarrel with Hutten;
and to Hutten's somewhat bitter attacks on him in consequence he
replied with ferocity in his _Spongia Erasmi adversus aspergines
Hutteni_.

Hutten had had to fly from Basel to Muelhausen and thence to Zuerich, in
the last stages of syphilitic disease. He was kindly received by the
reformer, Zwingli of Zuerich, who advised him to try the waters of
Pfeffers, and gave him letters of recommendation to the abbot of that
place. He returned, in no wise benefited, to Zuerich, when Zwingli
again befriended the sick knight, and sent him to a friend of his, the
"reformed" pastor of the little island of "Ufenau," at the other end
of the lake, where after a few weeks' suffering he died in abject
destitution, leaving, it is said, nothing behind him but his pen. The
disease from which Hutten suffered the greater part of his life, at
that time a comparatively new importation and much more formidable
even than nowadays, may well have contributed to an irascibility of
temper and to a certain recklessness which the typical free-lance of
the Reformation in its early period exhibited. Hutten was never a
theologian, and the Reformation seems to have attracted him mainly
from its political side as implying the assertion of the dawning
feeling of German nationality as against the hated enemies of freedom
of thought and the new light, the clerical satellites of the Roman
see. He was a true son of his time, in his vices no less than in his
virtues; and no one will deny his partiality for "wine, women, and
play." There is reason, indeed, to believe that the latter at times
during his later career provided his sole means of subsistence.

The hero of the Reformation, Luther, with whom Melanchthon may be
associated in this matter, could be no less pusillanimous on occasion
than the hero of the New Learning, Erasmus. Luther undoubtedly saw in
Sickingen's revolt a means of weakening the Catholic powers against
which he had to fight, and at its inception he avowedly favoured the
enterprise. In some of the reforming writings Luther is represented as
the incarnation of Christian resignation and mildness, and as talking
of twelve le