"We reached the princess Anna of Veere but just alive. What shall I say of the gentleness, the kindness, the liberality of this woman! I am aware that the exaggerations of fine writers are wont to be suspected, especially by those who have some skill at such things; but I beg you to believe that I exaggerate nothing;—nay rather that the truth goes beyond my skill. Nature never brought forth a being more modest, more clever, more spotless, more kindly. To put it all in one word:—her kindness to me was as far beyond my merits as the malice of that old scamp was contrary to my deserts. She, without any effort of mine, loaded me with as many kindnesses as he, after my endless kindness to him, heaped insults upon me. And Battus, dear fellow,—what shall I say of him, the simplest and most affectionate soul in the world! Now at last I really begin to hate those ingrates. To think that I should have been the slave of those monsters so long!"
We seem to have here a reference to his bête noire, the Paris persecutor, with whom Mountjoy was in some way associated.
The same tone of extreme laudation is kept up in a short and hurried letter[34] sent back to Battus from Antwerp on his way home. He has evidently been well treated, but is not yet at his ease about future favours from the lady. "I will fly back," he writes, "as soon as ever I can, if the gods permit." The remaining letters of this correspondence may belong to a later period, but will serve here to show how Erasmus continued his suit. While he is exhausting the language of flattery about his fair patron, he makes mysterious allusions to possible checks upon her liberality. She is in trouble; there are demands made upon her by unworthy persons. Finally it appears that she married someone quite below her station. The burden of Erasmus' song is that Battus ought to get ahead of these other claimants on the lady's bounty and make sure of his case before it is too late. One letter[35] shows downright ill-temper towards his dear friend, which he partly excuses on the ground of continued ill-health. Battus, it seems, had been urging him to write something, probably as an equivalent for favours to come. He replies:
"I hope to die if I ever in my life so hated to write anything as I did those trifles, nay, those Gnathonisms, which I have written for my Lady, for the Provost and for the Abbot. I know you will say this is my ill-temper; but you won't say that, Battus, if you think of my condition or if you consider how hard it is to force the mind to the writing of a great work, and how much harder yet, when it is all in a glow, to have it called off to other and trifling things. Because you haven't tried this yourself you fancy that my mind is always in perfect order, always on the alert, as yours is when you are enjoying the greatest possible leisure. Don't you understand that there is no worse burden than a mind wearied by writing, and don't you think I am doing enough here to satisfy those whose favours I enjoy? You are asking me for bales of books, but you don't help me to get the leisure which the writing of books demands. It isn't enough for you if I shall some day immortalise our friendship and the favour of my Lady by my books, but I must be writing you six hundred letters every day. It is now a year since you promised me money and meanwhile you send me nothing but hopes: 'I don't despair, I will push your case with all zeal.'—This sort of thing has been crammed into my ears too long; it makes me sick. And finally you lament the hard fortune of your mistress. You seem to me to be ailing with another's sickness. She neglects her fortune; you feel the pain! She fools and trifles with her N. and you snarl out: 'She hasn't anything to give.' Well! the only thing I see clearly is that if she gives nothing for these reasons she will never give anything, for reasons of this sort are never wanting to the great. How little it would be, with such vast wealth, fairly running to waste, to send me two hundred francs. She has plenty to keep those cowled whoremongers, those low-lived wretches,—you know whom I mean,—but she has nothing to provide leisure for a man who might write books worthy to live—if I may brag a little of myself. She gets into many a tight place, but it's her own fault, if she prefers to keep that pretty fellow rather than a grave and serious man, as becomes her age and sex. If she doesn't change her mind I foresee still greater troubles;—and yet I am not writing in anger against her, for indeed I love her as I ought, considering what she has done for me. But, come now, how can it hurt her fortune if I get two hundred francs? In seven hours she will never know it. The whole business comes to this: that we get the money out of her, if not in cash, then from her banker, so that I can draw it here at Paris. You have been writing letters and letters to her in this affair, asking, hinting, going round about; but what could be more useless? You ought to have watched your chance, gone at it carefully and then put it through boldly; now the same thing has got to be done, but too late. I hope to die, but I believe you might have carried it through as I wish, if you had only taken hold of it with more spirit. You can be a little more pushing in your friend's cause without offending my modesty.... Good-bye, my dear Battus, and take in good part what I have written, not in temper nor in a panic, but as to the man who is the very dearest of all men to me."
Another letter,[36] written from Orleans after his return from England, begins with similar references to some misunderstanding and goes on to the most barefaced of all Erasmus' begging efforts. Here occurs his first appeal for a church living, and this plainly not as a makeshift, but as the beginning of a regular speculation in livings:
"Then persuade her to look out for some church living for me so that when I come back I may have a quiet place to devote myself to my books. And not this only; give her some reason, the best you can make up for yourself, why she should promise me the first of the many livings she has. A pretty good one if not the best, and one that I can change for a better whenever it turns up. Of course I know there are many seeking for livings, but say that I am a man apart, one whom, if she compare him with all others, etc., etc.—you know your good old way of pouring out lies for your Erasmus. See to it that your Adolphus writes the same things, most seductive petitions namely, at your dictation. Keep it up until the promise of a hundred francs be fulfilled and if possible let it be handed over to your Adolphus, so that if,—which Heaven forbid!—any accident should take away the mother, I may get it from the son. Put in at the end that I have complained in my letters that I am suffering as Jerome often complains he suffered, from loss of eyesight and that I look forward to beginning to study as Jerome did with ears and tongue alone. Persuade her, with what elegant words you can, that she send me some sapphire or other gem that is good for strengthening the eyes. I would have written her myself what gems have this power, only I haven't my Pliny by me; do you find out for yourself from your medical man."
We have but one letter[37] from Erasmus to the lady of his hopes. It was written after his return from England and is an excellent illustration of the type of literature it represents. It is really an essay in classical composition, with its object, the getting of money, partly concealed under the cover of literary digression. This was probably the kind of thing which Erasmus liked to call nugæ and which he affected to consider a waste of time. He begins with a fantastic allusion to three other Annas, the sister of Dido, the mother of Samuel, and the grandmother of Jesus. These have all been sufficiently lauded by great writers. He will now proceed to add her as a worthy fourth to the list. We may spare ourselves his fulsome eulogies of the woman whom he has treated in his letters to Battus with something pretty close to contempt, and will quote only a specimen. He has shown how the great men of antiquity favoured the scholars of their day:—
"But I, thou muse of mine, would not change thee for any Mæcenas or any Cæsar. As for what I can give in return, I will strive, as far as this little talent and this manly strength of mine may go, that future ages shall know my Mæcenas and shall marvel that one woman at the ends of the earth strove to revive by her benevolence the cause of letters corrupted by the ignorance of the unskilled, cast down by the fault of princes, neglected through the indolence of men; that she would not suffer the labours of Erasmus, deserted by splendid promise-makers, despoiled by a tyrant, buffeted by all the blows of fortune, to fall away into poverty. Go on then, as thou hast begun. My writings, thy foster-children, stretch forth suppliant hands to thee and beseech thee by the fortune which thou spurnest when favourable and bearest bravely when hostile, by their own ever hostile fates, against which they stand by thy favour alone, and by the love of that excellent queen—I mean the ancient Theology—whom the divine Psalmist (as Jerome interprets) says stood at the right hand of God, not in foul rags as she is now seen in the fooleries of the sophists, but in golden vestments, girt with varied colours, to whose recovery from the mould all my vigils are devoted."
Then he becomes more explicit: two things he must have,—the trip to Italy and the doctor's degree, both of them really follies; he says:
"for it is quite true, as Horace tells us, that no one changes his intellect by running over the sea, and the shadow of a big word will not make one a hair's breadth more learned; but one must fit one's conduct to the times as they are and nowadays, I will not say the vulgar, but even those who are at the very top of learning, think no one can be truly a learned man unless he is called "magister noster," though Christ himself, the prince of theologians, forbids it. In former times no one was called "doctus" because he had bought the title of Doctor, but they were called Doctors who by putting forth books had given evident witness of their learning."