Page:English Historical Review Volume 35.djvu/25

 1920 ERASMUS 17 head-quarters) sending him a charming portrait of More and begging him to keep himself for the service of the Muses, for which he was so apt.^ Thus the relations of the two men drifted inevi- tably from bad to worse, until they reached a crisis in the miserable visit of Hutten to Basle (1522). Here he tried repeatedly to see Erasmus, but was carefully thwarted by the conditions his expected host placed upon the interview. The whole incident was as painful as it was perhaps inevitable. Erasmus, with hie just dislike to the public policy and the private life of Hutten, was not to be drawn like Zwingli,^ to whom he dedicated his Spongia, his spirited defence, into a patronage certain to be discreditable to the patron.^ In 1521 his old schoolfellow at De venter, who was also a former professor of Louvain, became pope as Adrian VI, and for a time hopes of reform seemed likely to be realized. He was invited to Rome, but did not go, although he gave his advice as to what should be done.* A council was necessary : every one must give up something for the common good. The evil had gone too far for burning or amputation. To consider all the questions which had arisen there should be called together from every country men of uncorrupted integrity, grave, mild, and without passion, whose opinion But at this point the letter to the short-lived pope breaks off suddenly and remains a most curious field for conjectm'e. The meeting of such a council was retarded by violence and stupidity on the side of the monks who had attacked Reuchlin, by violence and impatience on the side of Luther and his followers. Once Erasmus wrote of Luther that he seemed raised up divinely for the reformation of manners ; at another time he said the monks were thirsting for his blood, and that he himself for his part cared not whether they ate him boiled or roast. It is significant to notice that, when the point of papal » Strauss, p. 172. For the portrait of More, Nichols, iii. 387 f. Writing to Bude from Louvain (22 Feb. 1518) Erasmus says: 'I am truly glad that you like Hutten as I was myself singularly delighted with the man's character ' : Nichols, iii. 260. Eppendorf, Hutten's executor, really tried to blackmail Erasmus and caused him not annoyance but even alarm. of Hutten see Stahelin's Hvldreich Zwingli (Basel, 1895), ii. 314 f., and Jackson's H. Zwingli {Heroes of the Reformation, 1910). Zwingli was not only a thorough-going humanist like Hutten, but was himself concerned in political schemes for a league of cities, something like the revolutionary, schemes of Hutten. Hence he, unlike Erasmus, was doubly in sympathy with him. ' On the whole the opinion of Erasmus about Hutten is best expressed by his words to Jodocus Jonas in Ep. 572 (Le Clerc) of the year 1521 : ' the more I have loved the genius and the talents of Hutten, the more concerned I am to lose him by these troubles.' 639, 641, and 648. VOL. XXXV. — NO. OXXXVII. O
 * Extracts from the Spongia are given in Jortin, ii. 277-9. For Zwingli's reception
 * See Epp. 649, 703, and part ii (App.), 321, c. 1700 (Le ClercJ ; also 632, 633,