spent at Basle, but from 1517 to 1521 he lived at Louvain, and from 1529 to 1535 at Friburg.

Darkness was now closing in around him. He suffered tortures from the stone; like Pope he might have called his life a long disease. One by one his best-loved friends were cut off. Yet such was the buoyancy of his temperament, that into those sad years he compressed what to ordinary men would seem the labour of a lifetime. Of his enormous labours in patristic and classical literature, of the host of devotional works which he sent forth, we have no space to speak. His arduous literary toil was continued down to his last hour: when death came in 1536 he was hard at work on an edition of Origen. He made a fruitful excursion into the field of philology by an essay on the right pronunciation of Latin and Greek. Nor had his old lambent humour deserted him. In 1528 he published an exquisitely witty satire on the pedantic imitators of Cicero. By far the most characteristic work of this period, however, was the famous Colloquies, and with a short account of this, next to the Encomium Moria, the most popular of his works, we may fitly bring this study to a close.

The first edition of the Colloquies was published in 1519, but like the Adages it was long before it took final shape. As Erasmus journeyed hither

and thither over the length and breadth of Europe, dialogue after dialogue was added. Sometimes the dialogues were meditated as he sat in the saddle, and written down when he reached his inn; not, however, we may be sure, till he had his supper and his glass of good wine. They have a brisk and alert quality that reminds us of the manner in which they were composed; often they are instinct with the bustle and movement of travel in the open air. Erasmus had travelled over nearly all Western Europe, and wherever he had gone he had kept both his eyes and his ears open. He had been brought into contact with all sorts of men, from emperors and popes down to drunken bargemen and horsecheats. To read the Colloquies is to realise that Erasmus had in great measure the equipment of the dramatist-the intuitive perception of character, the keen eye for the significant and picturesque detail, the breadth of sympathy, the quick and eager curiosity. And the result is that they give us a more spirited and accurate idea of the actual state of Europe than pages of arid philosophical disquisition could do.

The Colloquies are full of plain speaking on the vices of the time. The satire has as keen and trenchant an edge as in the Encomium Moriæ; and it is perhaps all the more effective because

the sneer is often covert, and the vein of scepticism hardly shows beneath the decorous profession of belief. The invocation of the saints, the folly of pilgrimages, the excessive veneration paid to relics, the greed and rapacity of the monks, their immorality and their contempt for learning -all these topics are touched upon in the happiest manner of Erasmus. In spite of their tone of gay banter, the Colloquies were full of grave moral lessons for the men of the time. They did more, perhaps, to cut the feet from superstition than the most fiery denunciation could have done. For it is in the nature of violent invective to provoke contradiction and reaction, while well-directed ridicule insensibly saps the foundations of superstition.

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 1

He died too soon, who knew so well to live,
That sword-bright spirit, in so frail a sheath.
Not with head bowed beneath the weight of years,
But with fresh laurels clustering on his brow,
He fares to the far country, whence he comes
Never again to charm our ears with speech
Sweeter than honey or the honeycomb.
The fresh fair face of this green earth he loved,
And all the miracles which Nature works
On sea and sky, deep-bosomed woods and fields,
Where midst the corn the flaunting poppy stands,
Had yielded up their secret to his quest.
We mourn for one whose heart beat ever true
To Scotland, loved and left and hungered for,
And most of all our smoke-wreathed, castled city,
The well-loved city of his birth, which lost,
Alas! too soon, her gallant, gracious son.
'No stars,' he said, 'in all the vault of heaven,
To me so lovely as the lamps which shine
In fair Edina's city when the night

1 Published in Scots Magazine, November 1896.

Descends, and high in air the castle lifts
His huge grim mass across a gulf of darkness.'
Pentlands' black slopes and woods of sombre fir
His footsteps knew, and claimed him for their own.
There had he lain and gazed with musing eye,
Gazed on the spires, the labyrinthine lanes,
The houses rising high and quaintly peaked,
Dimly discerned through wreaths of curling smoke.
Such was his vision; but his thoughts flew far,
And wandered in the realms of old romance-
Realms kingless long, but now their king had

come.

Scotland he loved; but she, the austere mother,
Her forehead clouded with eternal wrath,
Her speech bitter, and her unfrequent smiles
Wearing no softness, thrust him forth from home,
To bear an exile's sorrow through the world—
Sorrow time heals not, no, nor troops of friends,
Nor all the bloom and beauty of the world.
For friends are many, but the name of mother
Belongs to one alone; that title none

Might share with her who travailed for his birth.
And though the gladsome sun looked down on

him

From skies more fair than ours, and perfumed winds
Wrapt him in softness, and a summer sea
Smiled and made music round his island home,
No power had these upon his present pain,