Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam

by Ephraim Emerton

"Sometimes when he showed to me and other friends the first pages of some great author, how he was transported with joy! how his face glowed! what triumphant words! You would say that he had already taken in the profits of the whole work in fullest measure and was expecting no other return. I am not exalting Froben by decrying others; but it is notorious what incorrect and inelegant editions some publishers have sent us even from Venice and from Rome. From his office, within a few years what volumes have gone forth, and in what noble form! And he has always kept his house free from books of controversy, by which others have gained great profit, lest the cause of good literature and learning should be defiled by any personal hostilities.... Surely it will be an act of gratitude for us all to pray for the welfare of the departed, to celebrate his memory by due praises, and to lend our favour to the house of Froben, which is not to be closed by the death of its master, but will ever strive to its utmost to carry forward what he has begun to still greater and better things."

This charming companion picture to the account of the Aldine establishment in Venice is probably in the main correct. It suggests the relation between publisher and author, which we have already tried without entire success to make clear. Apparently, on his own statement, Erasmus was in a way an employee of Froben. The anxiety which he betrays not to seem to take pay from the publisher, was plainly the same feeling which made him reject with such scorn the charge of Scaliger, that he had been in Aldus's employ. He was not ashamed of his work, any more than a European physician of a generation ago was ashamed of his; but he desired to have this work viewed as a labour of love, and any reward—which, of course, he could not entirely do without—was to be considered as a gift freely offered, and to be accepted only under a kind of protest.

Besides Froben himself, we find Erasmus making friends with the brothers Amerbach, sons of Froben's predecessor in the business. Writing to Pope Leo X.,[106] to ask his acceptance of the dedication to the works of Jerome, Erasmus enumerates his co-labourers in the great undertaking:

"The weightiest contribution was that of the brothers Amerbach, at whose expense and by whose labours, in common with those of Froben, the work was mainly carried through. The Amerbach family was, as it were, pointed out by the fates, that Jerome might live again through their exertions. The excellent father had his three sons educated in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, for this very purpose. Upon his death he commended the work to his children as an inheritance, devoting to its accomplishment all his resources. And these admirable youths entering upon the fair field committed to them by an admirable father, are labouring diligently therein, and have so divided the Jerome with me that they are doing everything except the epistles."

It would appear, then, that Erasmus' share in the Froben Jerome was the personal responsibility for the epistles, the writing of a dedication which was, after all, not addressed to Pope Leo, but to Archbishop Warham, and the use of his name as a general recommendation of the whole. Perhaps also he exercised a general supervision over the work of the others.

It was here also, probably, that Erasmus had his first personal relations with John Reuchlin, a man after his own heart, but already too much involved in active controversy with established powers to make him altogether a safe investment for a prudent scholar who could see something worth having on both sides of every question. Erasmus speaks of him to Leo[107] as

"that illustrious man, almost equally skilled in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and so well versed in every sort of learning that he can hold his own with the best. Wherefore all Germany looks up to him and reveres him as the phenix and the chief glory of the nation."

In the letters to Cardinals Grimani and Raphael, dated just a month earlier than this to Leo, Erasmus speaks much more heartily of Reuchlin. He has been expressing his determination to devote the remainder of his days to what our fathers used to call "curious learning," unless envy, "more fatal than any serpent," shall prevent,[108]