Page:Luther's correspondence and other contemporary letters 1507-1521.djvu/183

 Highness than to make the study of the best disciplines more pleasing to you, and to show that I could repay the free favor of so great a prince with mutual love.

The reason why I did not send you the volume from Basle, where it was printed, was the long distance, for you were then at Wittenberg, and the lack of a safe messenger. Later it seemed superfluous to send a book which was published everywhere.* In the meantime, I may be permitted to send this letter to inquire, as it were, whether my zeal were pleas- ing or otherwise. If my boldness chanced to be unfortunate, I will take care that whatever mistake has been perpetrated here shall be mended elsewhere. Nor do I doubt that your singular and well-known clemency will easily pardon that fault in one whose mind was certainly zealous and anxious to please, and who, however much he may have lacked judg- ment, certainly had the desire to please your Highness.

But if what we dared to do was fortunate, we ask no other reward than that you should continue to favor the cultivation of good literature, which has now begun to flourish everywhere throughout our Germany, and to defend this part of your fame, which, perhaps, will bring no less glory to our country or to her princes than war has hitherto done. This felicity will come to us if benignant princes shall cherish the best writers and the most promising youths, and if their authority shall continue by force of arms to protect us against those enemies of the Muses and that tyranny of inveterate Ignorance. For what do the adversaries of sound learning not attempt? What wiles, what spies, what fraud will they not use? What traps will they not set? What engines will they not set up? What poisoned darts will they not shoot at us? What a conspiracy, what an alliance they have formed to confound learning! Not having learned as boys, they are ashamed to do so as old men, and yet they could learn with less pains than they take to destroy learning. How well agreed are they who never agree save to destroy ! How much genius they show for this who are too stupid to learn an3rthing

June, X5i8» but Erasmus' dedication iB dmted a year earlier, June 5, 15 17. Allen: Opus epistolarum Erasmi, ii. p. 578. ^According to the Bibliotheco Brasmiana, ii. 31, it was first republished in isai.

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