e--it is no wonder that he held the affections of
his friends. Well might Erasmus liken him to the blessed man of the
first Psalm, 'who shall be as a tree planted by the waterside.'

We have seen Beatus' enthusiasm for queenly Basle. Of his native town
he was not so proud; though it has good Romanesque work in St. Fides'
church and rich Gothic in the minster, and though Wimpfeling had just
built a beautiful Renaissance house with Italian designs round its bay
window and medallions of Roman Emperors on the pilasters. The school,
too, was famous throughout Germany; and Lazarus Schurer had started a
creditable printing-press. Yet to Beatus the minster is only 'rather
good, but modern', the Dominicans' house 'mediocre', the nuns'
buildings 'unhealthy', the people 'simple and resourceless, as you
would expect with vine-growers, and too fond of drinking'. 'There is
nothing remarkable here', he says, 'but the fortifications; indeed we
are a stronghold rather than a city. The walls are circular, built of
elegant brick and with towers of some pretensions.' What pleased him
as much as anything was that the ramparts were covered in for almost
the whole of their length, and thus afforded protection to the
night-guards against what he calls 'celestial injuries'.

One reason that we know Beatus so well is that his library has
survived almost intact, as well as a great number of letters which he
received. At his death he left his books to the town of Schlettstadt;
and there they still are, forming the major and by far the most
important part of the town library. It is a wonderful collection of
about a thousand volumes, some of them extremely rare; many bought by
him in his Paris days, some presents from friends sent or brought from
far with dedicatory inscriptions. Hardly a book has not his name and
the date when he acquired it, or other marks of his use. But they have
not yet come to their full usefulness, for there is no adequate
catalogue of them. In many cases their direct value has passed away.
No one wishes to read the classics or the Fathers in the texts current
in the sixteenth century; yet behind printed books lie manuscripts,
and from examination of manuscripts on which printed texts are based,
we can gather many useful indications to throw light on the tradition
of the classics, the gradual steps by which the past has come down to
us. Besides such texts there are multitudes of original compositions
of Beatus' own period, b