[18] The careful inquiry of Dr. Richter into the birth-year of Erasmus attempts to fix the year 1466 as the correct date, but rather succeeds in showing the hopeless confusion of our material, and the evident ignorance and indifference of Erasmus himself on the subject.
[19] A papal brief of the year 1517, found recently at Basel, is endorsed: Dilecto filio Erasmo Rogerii Roterodamensi clerico. The editor, W. Vischer, believes, on this evidence, that the family name of our scholar was Roger and his baptismal name Erasmus. He thinks it probable that Erasmus had been more frank in his statements to the Pope than he usually cared to be and had given his true name in the petition to which this brief is the answer.
[20] H. Kämmel, "Erasmus in Deventer," in Neue Jahrbücher für Philologie und Paedagogik, 1874, Bd. 110, p. 305, quotes from Wm. Bates, an English editor of Erasmus' Compendium Vitæ in 1687, the desperate conjecture that this phrase refers to some manual prepared by the father of Erasmus! I suspect—assuming that we have a correct text—that the reference is to some forgotten Latin phrase-book, beginning perhaps with the words "pater meus." "Tempora" can hardly refer to anything but the tenses of the grammar.
[21] See in ii., 166, 167, the adage, "quid cani et balneo."
[23] On the question of the value of Erasmus' letter see [note to p. 223].
[24] iii.¹, 1024.
[25] iii.²; 1529-D.
[26] It was at the same time that he received from the bishop of Utrecht ordination as priest. Strictly speaking, this ordination was uncanonical, on account of his defect of birth, but we have no reason to think that it caused him or anyone else any scruples until many years afterward, when the point is distinctly covered in a papal dispensation of 1517.—W. Vischer, Erasmiana, pp. 26, 27.
[27] Car. Jourdain, Index chronologicus chartarum Universitatis Parisiensis, 1862, p. 301, n. I cannot quite adopt Mr. Rashdall's rendering that Master Standonch "took rich boarders and made them support the 'Pauperes.'" H. Rashdall, The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages, 1895, i., 512, n.