ERASMUS' RELATIONS WITH HIS Downloaded from PRINTERS. By P. S. ALLEN. http://library.oxfordjournals.org/ Read £5th iI/arch, £9£5. OS1' of us probably can recall something of the sensations with which we first saw ourselves in print. A boy reading his name for the first time in his school magazine feels to have stepped upon the stage of the at University of California, Santa Barbara on July 9, 2015 world and become almost a public personage: as though all eyes that passed over the important page could not but be rivetted upon initials and letters which to him seem so familiar. And when first he sees in print something of his own composition, what a wonderful adventure! the halting sentences are transfigured with dignity by their appearance in type, until, as he reads, he feels almost as though an oracle had spoken. If such thoughts can arise now, what must it have been when the art of printing was young! In the days of hireling scribes, ploughing out their work with no guarantee of uniformity, a budding author might allow himself ten or twenty copies of some composition, for presentation to patrons and friends; hoping that admiration might win for it wider existence. But if once he could persuade a printer to accept his work, his name might travel, whilst he slept, into all lands, from the borders of the "uncombed Russians" to the new dominions that a united Spain was 298 ERASlIIUS' RELA TlONS WITH HIS PRINTERS. founding across the Western seas. To a reputation for elegance he might add the credit of being modem and progressive, not a mere runner after novelties, but ready to profit by man's great inventions which had "come to stay." Hence it is that by 1$00 we find many names, often otherwise quite unknown, beside that of the author in the opening and closing Downloaded from pages of books. Friends present verses or letters of compliment, and he has not the heart nor the wish to deny them; dependents of the patron to whom he has dedicated his book, force their way in with similar effusions; even the printer's correctors struggle to get a mention. The art of self-advertisement-which is not without its uses and temptations http://library.oxfordjournals.org/ even to-day-had thus received a new development, for those that had the wits to make use of it. Erasmus was above all things quick-witted. The first glimpses that we have of him show him as dissatisfied with his surroundings, and catching at every opportunity to make his way out into a larger sphere. As the younger son of a poor parish priest, with both parents dead before he had reached nineteen, his entry into life was far less fortunate than that of youths who claimed a bishop or a cardinal as father. His early years at University of California, Santa Barbara on July 9, 2015 were not devoid of movement. From the town school of his native Gouda he went off as a singing-boy to the cathedral of Utrecht, under the famous musician Obrecht; and along its aisles-not yet so cruelly severed from the fine western tower-we may picture him in red cassock and lace-trimmed surplice playing pranks with all the audacious impishness of an enfant de choeur. Then for a long while, possibly nine years, he was at Deventer, one of the great schools of the age; and for the most part of his time there was immersed in the formal studies of the Middle Ages, until Hegius, who had learnt Greek from Agricola, came to be headmaster in 1483, and brought a breath of something better. A year later he left school, no doubt because of an outbreak of plague. He was hoping to make his way to the University: but his father died, and the guardians of his sons found no means left to gratify this wish. The best they could do was to find places for the boys in a seminary at ERASMUS' RELATIONS WITH HIS PRINTERS. 299 Hertogenbosch in Brabant, kept by the Brethren of the Common Life; and there two more years were spent. At the end Erasmus returned home to Gouda, to see little prospect of help from any quarter. After a period of dejection he drifted into a monastery which lay a mile outside the town; a house of Augustinian canons at Steyn. The attraction which Downloaded from drew him thither was certainly not the cloister rule. He was a religious man, but ever too original and independent to order his life at the command of others. It was rather that some possibility of study had been shown to him. Within the walls he might look for maintenance and leisure. The spirit of the Renaissance was stirring in the North, and he http://library.oxfordjournals.org/ had caught the infection. These beloved studies might lead him he knew not whither. The religious orders were powerful, and to a learned ecclesiastic many doors were open. But after two years he was still at Steyn, reading the classics and the Fathers, everything he could lay his hands on, amongst companions of whom some were openly disapproving, others stolidly apathetic; his only comfort a friend or two who could make some pretence of sharing his tasks, provided that he were not too insistent with them. at University of California, Santa Barbara on July 9, 2015 Dutchmen are rightly proud of their country, and Erasmus was no exception. In after years, though he never proposed to settle there again, he wrote of it with enthusiasm, as a land which lacked nothing of the conditions which make for cultivated and refined existence: attributing this to the great estuaries into which the stately ships could bring the wares of all the markets of the world, to be distributed again along its navigable rivers; praising its birds and fish, its groves and rich meadows.l But for all that it is a flat land, offering little variety to refresh the mind, unless perhaps an occasional church tower, standing guardian among the great fens, and only visible at intervals through gaps in distant fringes of trees. This is how an English visitor 2 writes of the now ill-famed island of Walcheren, thirty years later than the period we are considering. After (I) Adag. 3535: Auris Bataua. (2) Tunstall in 1517: see Erasmus, Ep. 663. 300 ERASMUS' RELATIONS WITH HIS PRINTERS. complaining of the peat-smoke in the towns, which pervades everything and fills nose and chest and head, he goes on: "If you wish to take a walk in the country the roads are so slimy that the least shower of rain renders progress difficult; and you cannot turn into the fields because of the deep ditches which cut you off on either side. The only pleasant Downloaded from place to walk is on the dykes beside the sea; but to get there you must pass hundreds of flax-pools, which smen worse than any drain. And as you must return the same way, they drive out any pleasure you have had, and send you home again dun and sad." Such was the land in which Erasmus' life was cast, in the petty circle of which the house at Steyn was http://library.oxfordjournals.org/ the centre. By the time he was 23. he had scarcely seen a hill, except the low eminences at Arnhem on his way to and from Deventer, and had per­ haps never set his foot" where the broad ocean leans against the land." At the age when our undergraduates have finished their course, he was pining for a university, Louvain or Cologne or the distant dignities of Paris. To his pent spirit, beating its wings against the bars and eager to be flown, the ships that later he could extol, must have brought only bitterness. They could spread their sails and be gone adown the breeze: at University of California, Santa Barbara on July 9, 2015 but for him it seemed the breeze would never blow. The Rhine that bore them forth had come from the snowy Alps, and beyond was the sweet realm of Italy, the Holy City and its famed river l : but his foot was chained, like a hobbled pony's, to the low lands in which he had been born, far away from the great centres of intellectual life. At length an opportunity came, and the young canon was quick to seize it. In the autumn of 1489 Gerard Leeu, the well-known Gouda printer, was on a visit to his home. Five years before he had moved his press to the more flourishing centre of Antwerp; and now, perhaps, having loaded his packs upon the barges that would carry them up the Rhine to the great fair at Frankfort, he had come away for a holiday to see his friends. One of the books that he brought with him was the curious (x) Cf. Ode 2 in the Sylzea Odaru17I of his friend and companion at Steyn, William Herman. ERASMUS' RELATIONS WITH HIS PRINTERS. 301 fourth-century Christian cento, composed out of Vergil by Falconia Proba, wife of a Roman magnate, and dedlcated to the Emperor Honorius. This had been edited for Leeu, 12th September, 1489, by James Canter of Groningen, a member of an erudite Friesland family, and brother of an infant prodigy who at the age of ten had been summoned to Vienna for the Emperor to see. Many of Leeu's books have plenty of room upon the title-page.