Annis exhibuit gratius hospitium.
Hinc precor, omnia læta tibi, simul illud, Erasmo
Hospes uti ne unquam tristior adveniat."
"And now, fair Basel, fare thee well!
These many years to me a host most dear.
All joys be thine! and may Erasmus find
A home as happy as thou gav'st him here."
At Freiburg he was well received by the magistracy and given a sufficiently splendid lodging in an unfinished palace of the Emperor Maximilian. He has, of course, doubts about his health, but thinks he will stay a year, unless he is driven away by wars. In fact he kept pretty well until the spring of 1530, when he was attacked by a new and painful development of the disease from which he had so long been suffering.
The references to this illness of 1530 occur generally in connection with some allusion to the great Diet of Augsburg in that year. Erasmus says that he was asked to go to this Diet by many leading men, but expressly states that he was not asked by the emperor. His illness gave him an excuse for not going. He says that he could have done no good at Augsburg and we certainly need no assurance of his to make this quite clear to us. By 1530 affairs had moved on far beyond the point where the only advice he had ever had to give, namely "be good and wise, and all our troubles will end at once," could be of any service. In the years from 1525 to 1529 the whole North of Germany had become welded into a solid mass of resistance to the Roman Catholic system. The Lutheran Reformation had passed the stage of negative criticism and had entered upon that of constructive organisation.
Once more we have to ask: Where was there room for poor Erasmus? It was a pleasant fiction for him, in his comfortable quarters at Freiburg, to imagine that he was really wanted at Augsburg, but who in the world could have wanted him? The time for his "ifs" and "buts" was past and the moment had come when men were ready to set all they held dear upon the hazard of a doubtful war. The Diet at Augsburg obeyed the emperor and renewed the formal condemnation of Luther and his works. The Protestant princes promptly replied by the League of Schmalkalden. Their attitude was simply one of readiness, not of aggression. For the time it answered, and delayed the actual outbreak of hostilities until long after the death of Erasmus.