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ERASMUS AT CAMBRIDGE IN 1506 593
Italy he must go as to the Promised Land. He was soon disillusioned.
He Tioved-ahiong the chreles of the learned, at Bologna, at Venice
and Padua, at Siena and in Rome; but even after months spent in
the society of John Lascaris and Marcus Musurus in Aldus’ Academy
he found he had not much to learn; and in later life he declared,
doubtless with some exaggeration, that he took to Italy more Greek
than he brought away **.
APPENDIX VII
THE PRINCIPAL EDITIONS OF ERASMUS’ EPISTOLAE
ALTHOUGH Erasmus did not publish any of his letters until he was
of mature age and had made a great name, he was alive from his
earliest youth to the importance attached by men of taste and learn¬
ing to the composition of elegant epistles, and took care to keep
copies of the more interesting that he wrote. From the survival of
Ep. 1 it seems probable that he had learnt at Deventer to write his
letters into a book; and this practice continued as he grew older.
Ep. 27* shows him copying the letters of Cornelius Gerard into a
volume, which no doubt contained also his own early letters to
Cornelius, Servatius Rogerus, and William Herman! The letters
of the last two were, however, apparently not considered worthy of
inclusion ; for they plainly formed no part of the collection which
came into Merula’s hands and from which he published the Vita
Erasmi (O°).
In his Paris days Erasmus was frequently solicitous about the
preservation of his letters *, and probably started a new letter-book ;
though in a few years he passed beyond the stage of copying them for
himself*. In 1505 he was already contemplating the publication
of some of them, and wrote to a friend of his youth to ask for his
early letter-book and for other epistles which might have been pre¬
served‘. An interesting indication of the importance attached to
letter-writing and of Erasmus’ fame is that in the spring of 1509
there reached him at Siena a volume of his own letters which a friend
had found in manuscript exposed for sale at Rome’. However
much he may have been flattered, he had no desire for such
unauthorized circulation, and at once had the book burned—an
action which he was obliged for similar reasons to repeat when he
returned to the North.
In 1516-8, when he settled in the Netherlands, he began another
letter-book, into which his servant-pupils copied the letters he wrote
and received; and so doubtless in the years that followed, until at
the end of his life he became less careful of such fugitive composi¬
tions°. The later ones have perished; but the volume of 1516-8
58 Resp.adP.Cwrsiidefens., LB.x.1755£. rather than epistolary, composition.
ORTOP ISG 3 Epp. 151. 17-9 and 163. 13.
2 Epp. 69, 71 introd., ror. 31, 128. 4 Ep. 186.
30-2; ‘aliquid nostrarum literarum ° ? Lond. i. 1, LB. 507; and see p. 452.
(Ep. 80. 29) perhaps refers to literary, ° See below p. 596.