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At Halsteren, near Bergen-op-Zoom, where the bishop had a country house, he revised the Antibarbari, begun at Steyn, and elaborated it in the form of a dialogue. It would seem as if he sought compensation for the agitation of his existence in an atmosphere of idyllic repose and cultured conversation. The personages whom he introduces, besides himself, are his best friends.
Allen. In the version in which eventually the first book of the Antibarbari appeared, it reflects, it is true, a somewhat later phase of Erasmus's life, that which began after he had left the monastery; neither is the comfortable tone of his witty defence of profane literature any longer that of the poet at Steyn.
Erasmus as an Augustinian canon at Steyn His friends Letters to Servatius Humanism in the monasteries: Latin poetry Aversion to cloister-life He leaves Steyn to enter the service of the Bishop of Cambray: 1493 James Batt Antibarbari He gets leave to study at Paris: 1495
In the spring his good friend Batt had died. It is a pity that no letters written by Erasmus directly after his bereavement have come down to us. We should be glad to have for that faithful helper a monument in addition to that which Erasmus erected to his memory in the Antibarbari. Anna of Veere had remarried and, as a patroness, might henceforth be left out of account.
He showed the Antibarbari to Gaguin, who praised them, but no suggestion of publication resulted. A slender volume of Latin poems by Erasmus was published in Paris in 1496, dedicated to Hector Boys, a Scotchman, with whom he had become acquainted at Montaigu. But the more important writings at which he worked during his stay in Paris all appeared in print much later.
What pure Latinity and the classic spirit meant to Erasmus we cannot feel as he did because its realization does not mean to us, as to him, a difficult conquest and a glorious triumph. To feel it thus one must have acquired, in a hard school, the hatred of barbarism, which already during his first years of authorship had suggested the composition of the Antibarbari.
More distinguished was Ferdinand Columbus, the explorer's natural son and heir, who in October 1520, on one of those journeys on which he gathered his famous library, received at Louvain a copy of Erasmus' Antibarbari, with his name inscribed in it by the author. A visitor to whom we must pay more heed was John Draco, one of the Erfurt circle, who in July 1520 came to pay homage at Louvain.
In Erasmus's writings that ideal wish ever recurs in the shape of a friendly walk, followed by a meal in a garden-house. It is found as an opening scene of the Antibarbari, in the numerous descriptions of meals with Colet, and the numerous Convivia of the Colloquies.
Pedantic work, if you like, laboured literary exercises, and yet full of the freshness and the vigour which spring from the Latin itself. Out of these moods was to come the first comprehensive work that Erasmus was to undertake, the manuscript of which he was afterwards to lose, to recover in part, and to publish only after many years the Antibarbari, which he commenced at Steyn, according to Dr.
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