THE EPISTLES OF ERASMUS FROM HIS EARLIEST LETTERS TO HIS FIFTY-FIRST YEAR ARRANGED IN ORDER OF TIME ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS FROM HIS CORRESPONDENCE, WITH A COMMENTARY CONFIRMING THE CHRONOLOGICAL BY FRANCIS MORGAN NICHOLS IN TWO VOLUMES VOLUME THE SECOND LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO. 39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON NEW YORK AND BOMBAY PREFACE OME time since, the compiler of the following pages, having had his attention attracted to the corre spondence of Erasmus, was struck by the observation, that a book of no little interest to his countrymen might be put together by an English editor, who would take the pains to pick out,-from the long series of mixed epistles of various dates 'included in the several printed collections, the letters of Erasmus's earlier years, when so much of his life was spent in this country, and present them to the English reader, arranged in order of time, with selected translations in his own tongue. A volume designed upon this plan, and published by the present writer in 1901, contains an account of the correspondence of Erasmus from his earliest letters to an important epoch in his life, when,-upon receiving at Rome the news of the demise of King Henry VII. of England, which took place on the 21st of April, 1509,-he was induced by the advice of his friends, and by his own sanguine expectations, to hasten back to this country in order to profit by the liberal spirit, which seemed to be imparting a new character to the new reign. The first chapter of the present volume will show how far his anticipations of preferment and of fortune were justified by the result; and the chapters that follow will carry on the account of his extant correspondence until the middle of August, 1517, when, after frequent migrations, which the reader may follow in detail by the account here given of his letters, Erasmus, in the latter part of his fifty-first year, had begun a residence at Louvain, that was to continue with little intermission for more than three years, but of which only the first six weeks, during which he was completing the arrangements consequent upon his removal, fall within the period comprised in this volume. It will be seen that, especially during the last three years of this period, a large proportion of the epistles here translated or described are letters, not of Erasmus himself, but of his various correspondents. If I have counted right, out of three hundred and three epistles dated between the 1st of September, 1514, and the 16th of August, 1517,-the date of the last letter translated in this volume,-not quite one-third of the whole (including ten dedications) were written by Erasmus, the letters of his correspondents being twice as numerous as his own. The reader of these epistles in the version here presented to him may perhaps find an additional interest in the number and variety of their writers. Most of our epistles of this time are derived from the manuscript collection preserved at Deventer, of which some account is given in the Introduction to our former volume. And after the close of the present volume the epistles included in Le Clerc's collection are still for some time mainly derived from the same source; but a much larger proportion are letters of Erasmus himself. This may be seen by a glance at the Register of Epistles printed in our |