Page:English Historical Review Volume 35.djvu/24

 16 ERASMUS January EocdvMLS^ he was none the less a little ready to avoid owning it as his offspring), he yet held the papacy to be the centre of unity and a possible source of reform. His own favourite methods were calm and quiet ; new disturbances he feared to excite, for they so often turned out contrary to expectation. Nevertheless, he was ready to use satire : it was first cousin to his peculiar humour. Thus, for instance, a Spanish Observant attacked him and pleaded an attack of fever as an excuse for imperfections in his work. The mere title of the reply quietly disposed of such an antagonist : Responsio adversus febricitarUis cuiusdam Ubellum. But satire backed up by a life like Hutten's was worse than useless, and so the two men parted company. Just as Erasmus differed from Hutten, so the Colloquies and Praise of Folly differed from the Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum. The latter, brilliant though it was, was purely literary ; the former have a dominant ethical purpose. Erasmus, moreover, a citizen of the world but with no real home or fatherland of his own, failed to understand the national fire which, after all, burnt in the very words of the riotous knight he loathed. ' Beata Tran- quillitas ' was not the motto of Mutianus Rufus alone. And yet so disturbed was the state of public opinion, so peculiar was the position of Erasmus himself, that he was suspected on the one hand of writing the attack of Henry VIII upon Luther and, on the other hand, of writing Luther's reply. Hutten, unlike Erasmus, welcomed revolution, both religious and political. The intercourse between the two men gradually became a trial of fence, the one seeking to involve the other while he was skilfully kept at bay. Hutten was anxious to draw Erasmus into his own circle, or at any rate to claim the credit of so great an ally ; Erasmus, on the other hand, much as he had admired Hutten to begin with, was resolved to avoid entangle- ments only too likely to become discreditable. Hutten, moreover, showed himself somewhat unscrupulous ; he printed without leave a letter from Erasmus to his patron, Albert of Mainz, in which he was spoken of favourably.^ Then later on a bitter attack by Hutten upon Archbishop Lee, who had criticized the Novum Instrumentum, did not fit the great scholar's idea of con- troversy. Hutten tried to frighten ^ Erasmus into a whole- hearted advocacy of Lutheranism and was particularly displeased with a letter to Laurinus (1523) defining the Erasmian position in the Lutheran controversies.* On the other side Erasmus wrote to Hutten (from Antwerp, although Lou vain was his ' On the Jvliua Exdnaus (the text of which is given in Jortin, ii. 600-22) see Nichols, ii. 299, 446-7, 495, 610 and 611 ; iii. 19, 20-1, 290, and especially 290. For a full discussion, see Allen, ii. 418 f. For an English translation, see Froude, 156 f. vol. ii, oh. xiv, is fair and full. » Strauss, p. 325. * Ep. 650.
 * Strauss, Ulric von Hutten, p. 320. The account of the whole matter in Drumraond,