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 Let 314 OTHER CONTEMPORARY LETTERS 37^

complish nothing here ? As long as he refuses to write against Luther we shall consider him a Lutheran." "Then you are a Lutheran yourself," say I, "for you have written nothing against him and not only you, but all your friends." Then bowing a farewell to the rector, but not to me, he departed.

��314. ERASMUS TO HIS PERSISTENT SLANDERER [VINCENT

DIERCX].

Erasmi opera, iii. 620. Louvain, (October?), 1520.

[This long letter of 12,700 words recapitulates most of the charges to which Erasmus had been exposed. Towards the end he returns to the quarrel with Egmond:]

So to make himself, as they say, like a dancing camel, he [Egmond] invoked the epistles of Paul, saying: "Paul, once a persecutor of the Church, from a wolf was made a sheep. Let us pray that the same may happen to Luther and Eras- mus." O Attic charms ' O slander like to blows ! Although he was laughed at and hissed by all he spared me no re- proach, even in his sermons. When he published the bull against Luther, he chanced to see me present, and suddenly changing the subject of his discourse, he spoke more against Erasmus than against Luther, nor did he make any end, but repeated his charges over and over. But when the audience began to nod to each other and to laugh, his face witnessed the impotent rage of his mind, and he broke off, rather than ended, his slanderous discourse. When I complained of it to Godschalk Rosemund, the rector of the university, he ran wild against me with the same sort of accusations and lies, so that one might rather think it was a clown talking to a rustic than an old man to an old man, a theologian to a the- ologian, a priest to a priest, and that in the presence of the rector.

[Erasmus then recites the substance of the colloquy given in the letter to More, supra, no. 313.]

His disciple, the prior of Antwerp, a doctor of the violet hood, excused himself before the magistrates for inciting to riot against Luther by saying that he had not read Luther's books, but that he acted at the command of Nicholas Eg-

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