and consequently what he regards as the shame of it. The whole of this character belonged eminently and almost solely to Erasmus: for the other reformers, such as Luther, Calvin, and their followers, understood so little in what true christian liberty consisted, that they carried with them, into the reformed churches, that very spirit of persecution, which had driven them from the church of Rome.
Ver. 696. And drove those holy Vandals off the stage.] In this attack on the established ignorance of the times, Erasmus succeeded so well as to bring good letters into fashion, to which he gave new splendour, by preparing for the press correct editions of many of the best ancient writers, both ecclesiastical and profane. But having laughed and shamed his age out of one folly, he had the mortification of seeing it run headlong into another. The virtuosi of Italy, in a superstitious dread of that monkish barbarity which he had so severely handled, would use no term (for now almost every man was become a Latin writer), not even when they treated of the highest mysteries of religion, which had not been consecrated in the capitol, and dispensed unto them from the sacred hand of Cicero. Erasmus observed the growth of this classical folly with the greater concern, as he discovered under all their attention to the language of old Rome, a certain fondness for its religion, in a growing impiety which disposed them to think irreverently of the christian faith. And he no sooner discovered it than he set upon reforming it; which he did so effectually in the dialogue, entitled Ciceronianus, that he brought the age back to that just temper, which he had been all his life endeavouring to mark out to it,—purity, but not pedantry in letters, and zeal, but not bigotry, in religion. In a word, by employing his great talents of genius and literature on subjects of general importance; and by opposing the extremes of all parties in their turns; he completed the real character of a true critic and an honest man.
[RAPE OF THE LOCK.]
AN HEROI-COMICAL POEM.
WRITTEN IN THE YEAR 1712.
THE RAPE OF THE LOCK.
AN HEROI-COMICAL POEM.
Nolueram, Belinda, tuos violare capillos,
Sed juvat hoc præcibus me tribuisse tuis.
Mart. Lib. 12. Ep. 86.