The panegyric to Philip, in its published form, was dedicated to Nicholas Ruterius, bishop of Arras. In the dedicatory letter Erasmus professes that this kind of writing was distasteful to him, and defends himself again by the reflection that

"there is no way so effectual for improving a prince, as to present to him, under the form of praise, the model of a good prince,—provided only that you ascribe virtues to him and take faults away from him in such wise that you urge him to the one and warn him from the other."

We are led to believe that Prince Philip was graciously pleased to approve the discourse of Erasmus. Doubtless he was as quick as the orator himself to explain it in a Pickwickian sense wherever it verged too closely upon unpleasant facts. He gave him a handsome present and is said to have offered him a place in his service which Erasmus, as usual, declined.

CHAPTER V
RESIDENCE IN ITALY—THE "PRAISE OF FOLLY"
1506-1509

We have already noted Erasmus' often-expressed desire to visit Italy. It is the alleged motive of his begging correspondence with the Marchioness Anna in and about the year 1500. At that time he professes to have little interest in Italy for its own sake, but to be yielding to a popular delusion that a doctor's degree was absolutely indispensable to a scholarly reputation and that an Italian doctorate was worth more than any other. In England he is quite satisfied that he has done just as well for his Greek and his scholarly advancement in general as if he had gone to Italy; yet the idea of the Italian journey seems never to have left him. It is an interesting inquiry precisely what the real attraction of Italy to Erasmus was.

One can easily draw a fancy picture of what ought to have attracted him. Italy had naturally for the scholar of the Renaissance a double interest, first as the seat of ancient Roman culture, and again as the source and spring of that modern revival in which he himself formed a part. It might well appeal to the instinct of the antiquarian and the sight-seer, eager to bring visibly before himself the remains of ancient splendour, the living and vivid reminders of a mighty past. He might hope to live again in the charmed atmosphere of Virgil and Horace, to sit amid the scenes already familiar to him in the glowing pages of Cicero, and to bring into his mind some more adequate understanding of the vast achievements he had read of in the pregnant story of Livy or of Julius Cæsar.

The appeal of Italy, in short, to the historical imagination is, one would say, perhaps the most powerful that has ever come to a scholar's mind from that land of enchantment. It was a time, too, when men's thoughts and activities were turning eagerly to all that side of the new classical study. For a century and a half, ever since the days of Petrarch and Rienzi, the treasures of ancient art, Greek as well as Roman, had been brought to light, gathered into great collections, and made to do their part in the education of Europe. The limits of the Eternal City had been turned into one great treasure-house of precious reminders of former and presages of a future greatness. The visitor to Rome or to Florence might study from the originals the choicest forms in which the art of the ancient world had expressed itself.

It is hard to fancy that Erasmus, in his thoughts of Italy, can have failed to be drawn by the anticipation of living thus bodily in the presence of the human world from which he drew his literary inspiration and toward which all his serious thought went back as to its natural source. Yet the fact is that neither in the anticipation nor in the reality of his Italian journey do we find such reference to these things as would warrant us in thinking that they formed any essential part of his ideas about Italy. That sense of an overwhelming grandeur, a something indescribably greater than all that had come since, which has fallen upon so many an Italian traveller, seems to have been entirely absent in his case. When Goethe entered Italy, it was with bated breath and reverent awe at the stupendous remains of a civilisation whose influence was even then potent in the lives of men. So far as Erasmus has left us any witness of himself his mind was occupied solely with the immediate profit of the moment: his doctor's degree, his new publisher, the petty comforts and discomforts of daily life.