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Again Erasmus, in his Praise of Folly, denounces indiscriminately churches, priesthoods, dogmas, ethical values, the whole structure of organized religion, calling it those "foul smelling weeds of theology."
He was indeed precisely what we now call a Broad Churchman, accepting forms as convenient, though not essential, to faith. No one was better qualified to interpret him than Froude, whose translations of his letters, though free and sometimes loose, are vivid, racy, and idiomatic. Froude was by no means a blind admirer of Erasmus.
"When Colet speaks I might be listening to Plato," says Erasmus in another place, at a time when he was still younger and had just come from what had been a gay and perhaps in some measure a dissolute life in Paris: not that it is possible to imagine Erasmus as at any time committing great excesses, or deeply sinning against the sense of proportion and measure.
On the one side he was one of the earliest and one of the most industrious of those who have been called the "document" or "reporter" novelists now collecting enormous stores of newspaper cuttings and busying himself with keenest interest in the things of the day; now, as in The Cloister and the Hearth, not disdaining to impart realism and vividness to his pictures by adapting and almost translating whole passages from Erasmus' own Colloquies.
The way in which Erasmus always tries to shirk definite statements irritates us. How carefully he always tries to represent the Colloquies, in which he had spontaneously revealed so much of his inner convictions, as mere trifling committed to paper to please his friends. They are only meant to teach correct Latin!
With Ursel she would be protected from the terrors of solitude, for, besides the old woman's voice, a man's tones also reached her through the open window. It was probably the companion of her childhood. In his society she would most speedily regain her lost peace of mind. In his place she had at first found only Erasmus Eckhart. The strong, bold boy had become a fine-looking man.
Colet had a deeply serious nature, always warring against the tendencies of his vigorous being, and he kept within bounds his pride and the love of pleasure. He had a keen sense of humour, which, without doubt, endeared him to Erasmus. He was an enthusiast.
Barneveld then presented several gentlemen attached to the mission, especially his son and Hugo Grotius, then a lad of fifteen, but who had already gained such distinction at Leyden that Scaliger, Pontanus; Heinsius, Dousa, and other professors, foretold that he would become more famous than Erasmus.
Into many of the congregation now worshipping yonder he must have driven the three R's, possibly with the assistance of the faithful ferrule aforesaid, yet how many of them gave a thought to his memory! In this case the assertion that he "rested from his labours" was a trifle ambiguous. Consigning poor Erasmus to oblivion, I continued my walk.
Mills was the last of the primitives, for following him came Erasmus D. Palmer and Thomas Ball, the two men who, more than any others, shaped the course and guided the development of American sculpture. Erasmus Palmer was born in 1817, and followed the trade of a carpenter. But in the odd moments of 1845, he made a cameo portrait of his wife, which was a rather unusual likeness.
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