Again:—
‘The office of a prince is called a “dominion,” when in truth a prince has nothing else to do but to administer the affairs of the commonwealth.
‘The intermarriages between royal families, and the new leagues arising from them, are called “the bonds of Christian peace,” though almost all wars and all tumults of human affairs seem to rise out of them. When princes conspire together to oppress and exhaust a commonwealth, they call it a “just war.” When they themselves unite in this object, they call it “peace.”
‘They call it the extension of the empire when this or that little town is added to the titles of the prince at the cost of the plunder, the blood, the widowhood, the bereavement of so many citizens.’[509]
Rapid sale of the ‘Praise of Folly.’
These passages may serve to indicate what feelings were stirred up in the heart of Erasmus by the condition of international affairs, and in what temper he returned to England. The works in which they appeared he had left under the charge of Beatus Rhenanus, to be printed at Basle in his absence. And some notion of the extent to which whatever proceeded from the pen of Erasmus was now devoured by the public, may be gained from the fact that Rhenanus, in April of this very year, wrote to Erasmus, to tell him that out of an edition of 1,800 of the ‘Praise of Folly’ just printed by Froben, with notes by Lystrius, only sixty remained in hand.[510]
III. RETURNS TO BASLE TO FINISH HIS WORKS.—FEARS OF THE ORTHODOX PARTY (1515).
It will be necessary to recur to the position of international affairs ere long; meanwhile, the quotations we have given will be enough to show that, buried as Erasmus was in literary labour, he was alive also to what was passing around him—no mere bookworm, to whom his books and his learning were the sole end of life. As we proceed to examine more closely the object and spirit of the works in which he was now engaged, it will become more and more evident that their interest to him was of quite another kind to that of the mere bookworm.
Erasmus returns to Basle.
Before the summer of 1515 was over he was again on his way to Basle, where his editions of Jerome and of the New Testament were now really approaching completion. Their appearance was anxiously expected by learned men all over Europe. The bold intention of Erasmus to publish the Greek text of the New Testament with a new Latin translation of his own, a rival of the sacred Vulgate, had got wind. Divines of the traditional school had already taken alarm. It was whispered about amongst them that something ought to be done. The new edition of the ‘Praise of Folly,’ with notes by Lystrius, had been bought and read with avidity. Men now shook their heads, who had smiled at its first appearance. They discovered heresies in it unnoticed before. Besides, the name of Erasmus was now known all over Europe. It mattered little what he wrote a few years ago, when he was little known; but it mattered much what he might write now that he was a man of mark.