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'If, what I pray may never happen, he writes to Sadolet in 1530, 'you should see horrible commotions of the world arise, not so fatal for Germany as for the Church, then remember Erasmus prophesied it. To Beatus Rhenanus he frequently said that, had he known that an age like theirs was coming, he would never have written many things, or would not have written them as he had.
Boomer would greet a business acquaintance with a roaring salutation of, "Terque quaterque beatus," or stand wringing his hand off to the tune of "Oh et presidium et dulce decus meum." This caught them every time. "You don't," said Tomlinson the Wizard in a hesitating tone as he looked at the smooth grass of the campus, "I suppose, raise anything on it?"
Everywhere else the ideas of contrast appear and the enjoyment of nature is elegiac or satiric. It is true that these sentiments exist only for us. To Horace, Tibur seemed more modern than does Tivoli to us, as is proved by his 'Beatus ille qui procul negotiis, but it is only an illusion to imagine that we ourselves would like to be inhabitants of Athens or Rome.
At that point, my dear Beatus, some god or bad angel deprived me, not of the half of my senses, as Hesiod says, but of the whole: for he had deprived me of half my senses when I risked going to Cologne. I wish that either my friend had warned me more sharply or that I had paid more attention to his most affectionate remonstrances! I was seized by the power of fate: what else am I to say?
I have at last seen the Utopia at Paris printed, but with many misprints. It is now in the press at Basle; I had threatened to break with them unless they took more trouble with that business than with mine. Farewell, most sincere of friends. To his friend Rhenanus, greetings: ... Let me describe to you, my dear Beatus, the whole tragi-comedy of my journey.
do but peep behind the curtain, and you will see no thing more than an ordinary man, and peradventure more contemptible than the meanest of his subjects: "Ille beatus introrsum est, istius bracteata felicitas est;"
Can it really be that the nearer they are to the Circus, and even to the Stores " "O beatus illa!" interjected Madame upon the pinions of a sigh. "Yes, Sophronia, the Stores, the more clearly is the knowledge of the future vouchsafed to them? If it should prove to be so!" Madame stared again upon the Prophet with a fixity and strained inquiry which made him shift in his seat.
Louis; missionaries, such as John de Corvino, Jordanus de Severac, or Friar Beatus Oderic, laboring to establish the faith in India and China; merchants, such as Pegalotti and Schiltberger, seeking advantage in the way of trade: these, and many more besides, penetrated into every part of Asia and recorded in letters, in dry and precise merchant hand-books, in naïve and fascinating narrative accounts, a wealth of information about this old world now first discovered to Europeans.
Yet to Beatus the minster is only 'rather good, but modern', the Dominicans' house 'mediocre', the nuns' buildings 'unhealthy', the people 'simple and resourceless, as you would expect with vine-growers, and too fond of drinking'. 'There is nothing remarkable here', he says, 'but the fortifications; indeed we are a stronghold rather than a city.
And Beatus Rhenanus devotes to him a life of earnest admiration and helpfulness that was to prove of much more value than these exuberant panegyrics. There is an element of national exaltation in this German enthusiasm for Erasmus: it is the violently stimulated mood into which Luther's word will fall anon.
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