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Updated: June 23, 2025
His attention had perhaps been aroused by a flattering mention of him in a preface written in Froben's name for the pirated edition of the Adagia, August 1513, to which Erasmus was referring in the letter just quoted.
Had he not himself desired that in the church hymns the metre should be corrected, not to mention his own classical odes and paeans to Mary and the Saints? And was his warning against the partiality for classic proverbs and turns applicable to anything more than to the Adagia? We here see the aged Erasmus on the path of reaction, which might eventually have led him far from humanism.
He promised to prepare everything for the press and, on 5 January 1513, he finished, in London, the preface to the revised Adagia, for which Badius was waiting. But then something happened.
This third age in the history of the Renaissance Scholarship may be said to have reached its climax in Erasmus; for by this time Italy had handed on the torch of learning to the northern nations. The publication of his "Adagia" in 1500, marks the advent of a more critical and selective spirit, which from that date onward has been gradually gaining strength in the modern mind.
Just where he would have had an opportunity, in explaining Martial's Auris Batava in the Adagia, for venting his spleen, he availed himself of the chance of writing an eloquent panegyric on what was dearest to him in Holland, 'a country that I am always bound to honour and revere, as that which gave me birth.
Here we will anticipate the course of Erasmus's life for a moment, to enumerate the principal works of this sort. Some years later the Adagia increased from hundreds to thousands, through which not only Latin, but also Greek, wisdom spoke. In 1514 he published in the same manner a collection of similitudes, Parabolae.
What could he not have produced if, instead of gleaning and commenting upon classic Adagia, he had, for his themes, availed himself of the proverbs of the vernacular? To us such a proverb is perhaps even more sapid than the sometimes slightly finical turns praised by Erasmus. This, however, is to reason unhistorically; this was not what the times required and what Erasmus could give.
It forced him to resume the profession of a bel esprit, which he already began to loathe, and to take all the humiliating steps to get what was due to it from patrons. And, above all, it affected his mental balance and his dignity. Yet this mishap had its great advantage for the world, and for Erasmus, too, after all. To it the world owes the Adagia; and he the fame, which began with this work.
Beatus Rhenanus, afterwards, made no secret of the fact that a connection with the house of Froben, then still called Amerbach and Froben, had seemed attractive to Erasmus ever since he had heard of the Adagia being reprinted. Without conclusive proofs of his complicity, we do not like to accuse Erasmus of perfidy towards Badius, though his attitude is curious, to say the least.
With the Adagia published by Aldus he says that he cast his eye over the final proofs, not in search of errors, but to see whether he wished to make any changes. But in the main his books, like everybody else's, were left to the care of others. The fact is that in the splendour of the new invention of printing, the possibilities of accompanying error had not been realized.
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