should not have been well pleased to wear a cardinal's hat. It is pretty certain that the dignity, once at least in his life, was within his reach. It is equally certain that he never claimed it. His modesty could not have sprung from contempt for the splendors of office. It can only be ascribed to dread of its cares. To be caressed by the great as a man of learning and wit, cost him no anxiety beyond the light one to approve himself a pliant and acceptable courtier. Even this, notwithstanding his marvellous facility, sufficed to afflict him with apprehensions that were absolutely ludicrous. To have been a cardinal-but no one laughed more heartily at the idea than Erasmus himself.

It would perhaps be no stretch of charity, to dignify Erasmus' love of ease by a more honorable name. He was certainly not indolent. His multifarious works of authorship and editorship effectually defend Erasmus against the accusation of idleness. His industry, in fact, was remarkable, even in that age, and among a people proverbial for their industry. His literary achievements were the envy of all his peers in the Republic of Letters, and may well excite the astonishment of a generation for whom it is something more than diversion merely to read tomes, which he wrote, in a language long deceased, with an idiomatic grace and vigor, that it is scarcely exaggeration to say, with Stephen, would have surprised Cicero himself by the discovery of unconjectured capacities of expression. He was perpetually employed. The intercisa tempora, which form such a ruinous leakage with most lives, he turned to golden account. The "Praise of Folly," which he afterward wrote at Sir Thomas More's in nine days, was meditated and partly composed on horseback. Whenever he journeyed, his halts at inns were improved to secure in writing the thoughts and humors and fancies that occurred to him on the road. Such a man cannot justly be charged with 'fondness for ease. His love of ease was more truly love of leisure. Whatever drew him from the Muses was hateful to him. But name it which we will, love of ease or love of leisure, it was a disposition which fatally disqualified him for the part of a reformer. Addiction to studious quiet would unfit a man to

lead in any reformation. Pre-eminently in a religious reformation, whose demands are intolerant of any considerable division of zeal.

Had Erasmus been far less ardently devoted to literary leisure than he was, the same eager vanity which, despite the absence of other qualities indispensable to a reformer, impelled him to engage in the Reformation, would in the presence of those qualities have prevented his succeeding. Another inspiration than vanity was required for the hero of that hour. The prophet who undertook to perform the work of Elijah, needed also to possess some portion of his power and spirit. But in addition to these two sources of weakness, he had yet another of the tribe of lighter vices, which in a still higher degree disqualified him for the apostleship of the Reformation. Erasmus was deeply deficient in moral courage. We now mention the capital fault of his character.

Strange to say, he made no scruple of openly displaying this deplorable nakedness. And yet do we err in deeming moral courage an endowment of such consequence, that its presence shall confer an aspect of sublimity upon a character not otherwise lifted above mediocrity—while nothing but mental capacities the most extraordinary can prevent its absence from impoverishing any character of every attribute of greatness? Bacon was great without it, it is true but his mind was of a very different order from that of Erasmus. The mind of Bacon belonged to the limited number of those which men have agreed to consider greatest. It was profound, comprehensive, philosophical and original. It abounded in prophetic intuitions of truth, and exercised itself familiarly with the amplest generalizations. So rich in the rarest gifts of nature-yet how would the gift of moral courage have completed the equipment of this wonderful genius! The mind of Erasmus was an exquisite, an unequalled instrument for a scholar-acquisitive, facile, keen, each in a remarkable degree-but destitute alike of great profundity, great comprehensiveness, great philosophical aptitude, and great originality. It had unusual capacities of discursive acquirement, and versatile use. But

of all those characteristics for which we reserve the appellation great, it had not a single one. Wanting moral courage, Erasmus wanted everything. Learned, witty, amiable, charitable, affectionate, insincere, parasitic, timid, irresolute, evasive, vain-there was nothing truly great about him, unless it were his comprehensive littleness.

We remarked that Erasmus did not affect to conceal his lack of moral courage. True, he would at times attempt to disguise it under a show of Christian charity, prudent moderation, virtuous love of concord. Oftener, however, he was frank, and confessed his weakness--but it was then commonly with a sarcastic humor and skeptical levity, which too clearly betrayed the exceeding shallowness of his moral nature. To Dean Pace of London he expressed himself thus: "Even if Luther had written all in a pious spirit, it was no part of my intention to peril my head for the sake of the truth. Not every man has firmness enough for a martyr; and I fear that if a tumult had arisen I should have imitated Peter." What a confession was this! Could a really sincere and noble nature have made it—without at least giving" signs of remorse and passion" for its own deficiency? But the confession was honest, however mis-becomingly made; and his conduct nowhere rose superior to the spirit which prompted it.

It is beyond dispute, that with whatever aim, Erasmus had in fact contributed not a little to the success of the Reformation. It was a common remark, that Erasmus had laid the egg, and Luther hatched it. Something of that ineffable unconsciousness with which oftentimes quiet hens perform the process of incubation for strange offspring that they are unable afterward to recognize, must, we are bound to believe, have attended in this case the deposit of the egg. Erasmus never denied that he laid an egg, but insisted that it was a hen's egg, and that Luther had hatched it a very different bird. We must question the explanation. We shall persist in thinking it far more likely that Erasmus himself mistook the species of the germ, than that the regular law of development suffered any interruption. His theory, however, will serve us as a hint by which to interpret his interference in the Reformation.

Erasmus was a wit and a satirist. In spite of his loyalty to the Church, his sense of the ludicrous was quite too lively not to be impressed with the gross incongruities that deformed her aspect. Especially the monastic institution attracted his Democritan eye. Doubtless the unhappy part of his parents' history, and the sad experience of his own much-abused youth, helped him in no slight degree to the estimate which he formed of the system. He has recorded in his serious writings his mature conviction, that let its original object have been what it might, its practical workings were fraught with evil. The only thing he learned to hate with perfect hatred was the monks. Their grotesque attire, their solemn deceits, their absurd ignorance, their squalid zeal, their vile gluttony, made them most admirable subjects of satire. He lost no opportunity, seasonable or unseasonable, of turning them to ridicule. In conversation, in his letters, in his Adages amid learned philological comment, even in his Greek Testament amid pious exegesis, he never forgot the monks. But most effectually in his Colloquies, and his Praise of Folly, he pilloried them for the inextinguishable laughter of Europe.

All unconsciously he had been aiming a blow at not only the most vulnerable, but likewise the most vital part of Popery. To the extraordinary serviceableness of the religious orders, the Popes owed both the founding and the upholding of their supremacy. Erasmus, to be sure, was not first to bring them into popular discredit, but no one had done it so thoroughly before. It is much to be lamented, that in so useful a service, he should have been actuated rather by hatred of the monks, than by love of true religion. Certain it is, that his truly valuable contributions to the aid of the best cause, must be credited, not to the excellence of his intentions, but to the overruling providence of God. Else why should he afterwards have wished to recede?

His bon mots at the expense of the Church, which it was as impossible for the hearer not to repeat as it was for him not to utter, usually made the tour of Europe, everywhere awakening attention to the prevailing disorders, and sowing the seeds of freer thought. His critical labors on the Greek

Testament, in which he was pioneer when there is said to have been but one copy in Germany, at the same time created new facilities, and kindled new zeal for the study of God's Word while his learned editions of the Christian Fathers opened the renovating fountains of an earlier and more uncorrupt interpretation. It is not easy to overrate the quickening influence of these two classes of writing on the nascent Reformation. But that he himself had no deeper design in the one, than to exercise his wit, and gratify his spleen, or in the other, to do an acceptable work of professional scholarship, is proved by his subsequent conduct. Evidently he little suspected what a ruin he was precipitating. Who," he writes, "could have foreseen this horrible tempest ?" When the train which he had ignited with a merry laugh reached the "combustible and fuelled entrails" of the Papacy, and the whole world began to rock, nothing could exceed his consternation. He behaved like a boy who has thoughtlessly put a match to a parcel of dry leaves to enjoy a bonfire, and who runs frightened away, when he sees the building wrapped in flames. He had amused himself by casting firebrands, and the serious business of the rest of his life was to convince men that he had been in sport. Unable to endure the aspect of his offspring, he "fled, and cried out Death."

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It was entirely suitable for such a man to conclude that it was all over with Luther, when Leo fulminated his famous bull against him. While the latter was lighting a bonfire with the pontifical thunder in the public square at Wittemberg, Erasmus wrote to Noviomagus: "Would to God he had followed my counsels! It would be no great matter that one man should perish; but if these people (the monks) should get the better, they will never rest till they have ruined literature." Here speak in curious conjuncture at once his vanity, his timidity, his want of magnanimity, his hatred of the monks, and his concern for literature. The last sentiment is really the key to his character and caIt is the one thing which gives them their only consistency. Erasmus was a typical scholar. Good literature was the "master light of all his seeing."

reer.

Were his fame