"Almost incredible as it seems, I have left my nest and flown hither, meaning to fly to you when I shall have recovered my strength. The wintry September has compelled me to cast anchor here and so we shall have to wait for the swallows. The pope wants to gold-plate me whether I will or no, and has offered me the provostship of Deventer now that the harpies are all got rid of. But I am determined, though ten provostships were offered me, not to take one of them.... Shall I, a dying man, accept burdens which I have always refused?"
Just as he arrived at Basel he had written:
"What has happened in England to Fisher and More, a pair of men, than whom England never had a better or a holier, you will learn from the fragment of a letter which I send you. In More I seem myself to have perished, so completely was there, as Pythagoras has it, but one soul to both of us. Such are the tides of human life!"
It is pleasant to believe that the last days of Erasmus were cheered by the thought that his protestations of fidelity to the Roman institution were not wholly unrewarded, though, as he says, there were still men at Rome who were doing their best to blacken his fame. He had welcomed the election of Paul III. in much the same language as he had employed in regard to Leo X., Hadrian VI., and Clement VII. He wrote to him at once, but we have, unfortunately, only the brief reply of the pope. It is a very amiable and appreciative note, recognising the value of Erasmus' services and expressing entire confidence in their continuance. It is quite in harmony with his whole career that these congratulations of the pope should have come to him in Basel, now thoroughly converted into a Protestant community, and in the midst of friends the most tried and true he had ever had, all of them Protestants, but all willing to forget differences in their common regard for the dying scholar.
We are not well informed as to the end of Erasmus' life. The last letter in the collection of Le Clerc, perhaps the last he ever wrote, is to his old friend Goclenius at Louvain, under date of June 28, 1536. He is among faithful friends, better friends than he had at Freiburg, "but on account of differences in doctrine I would rather end my life elsewhere. Would that Brabant were nearer!" Again he repeats his declaration that he came to Basel only for a change of air and was intending to go elsewhere as soon as he felt better. The ruling passion was strong upon him even to his death.
The story of his last days comes to us through the excellent Beatus Rhenanus, his devoted friend and admirer. The winter brought on a terrible attack of gout, succeeded in the early summer by a continuous dysentery which proved incurable. In spite of pain and weakness he never lost a moment's opportunity of work, the witness whereof is the treatise De Puritate Ecclesiæ and the edition of Origen. He was in the house of the son of his old friend Froben, the intimates of his earlier residence were all about him, and evidently were glad and proud to have him again in their midst.
We have no suggestion, in the eleven months of his stay at Basel, of any personal dealings with the Roman clergy, nor of the presence of any minister of religion at his death-bed. He had lived a cosmopolitan of the earth; he died, so far as we know, a cosmopolitan of the world to come—a Christian man trusting for his future to the simple faith in right doing and straight thinking which had really been his creed through life. His death occurred on the 12th of July, 1536. Protestant Basel claimed as her own the man who had turned his back on her when she was working through her own religious problem, but who had after all been drawn to her again by the subtle ties of a sympathy he could not or would not openly acknowledge.
"How great was the public grief," says Beatus, "was shown by the throng of people to take their last look at the departed. He was borne on the shoulders of students to the cathedral and there near the steps which lead up to the choir, on the left side of the church, by the chapel of the Blessed Virgin, was honourably laid to rest. In the funeral procession walked the chief magistrate and many members of the council. Of the professors and students of the University not one was absent."
The impression of Beatus' narration is confirmed by a letter[196] of the Leipzig physician, Heinrich Stromer, written immediately after the death of Erasmus to George Spalatin. He adds: