iling strength. He thought
of going back to England, but England had by this time caught fire, and
Basle had caught fire. There was no peace on earth.

'The horse has his heels,' he said, when advised to be quiet, 'the dog
his teeth, the hedgehog his spines, the bee his sting. I myself have my
tongue and my pen, and why should I not use them?'

Yet to use them to any purpose now, he must take a side, and, sorely
tempted as he was, he could not.

With the negative part of the Protestant creed he sympathised heartily;
but he did not understand Luther's doctrine of faith, because he had
none of his own, and he disliked it as a new dogma.

He regarded Luther's movement as an outburst of commonplace revolution,
caused by the folly and wickedness of the authorities, but with no
organising vitality in itself; and his chief distress, as we gather from
his later letters, was at his own treatment. He had done his best for
both sides. He had failed, and was abused by everybody.

Thus passed away the last years of one of the most gifted men that
Europe has ever seen. I have quoted many of his letters. I will add one
more passage, written near the end of his life, very touching and
pathetic:--

'Hercules,' he said, 'could not fight two monsters at once; while I,
poor wretch, have lions, cerberuses, cancers, scorpions every day at my
sword's point; not to mention smaller vermin--rats, mosquitoes, bugs,
and fleas. My troops of friends are turned to enemies. At dinner-tables
or social gatherings, in churches and king's courts, in public carriage
or public flyboat, scandal pursues me, and calumny defiles my name.
Every goose now hisses at Erasmus; and it is worse than being stoned,
once for all, like Stephen, or shot with arrows like Sebastian.

'They attack me now even for my Latin style, and spatter me with
epigrams. Fame I would have parted with; but to be the sport of
blackguards--to be pelted with potsherds and dirt and ordure--is not
this worse than death?

'There is no rest for me in my age, unless I join Luther; and I cannot,
for I cannot accept his doctrines. Sometimes I am stung with a desire to
avenge my wrongs; but I say to myself, "Will you, to gratify your
spleen, raise your hand against your mother the Church, who begot you at
the font and fed you with the word of God?" I cannot do it. Yet I
understand now how Arius, and Tertullian, and Wickliff were driven into
schism. The theologians say I am their enemy. Why?