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OCR
596 APPENDIX VII consists of four apologetics only, with the letter by which one of them was provoked. In 1529, at the request of Jerome Froben, Erasmus undertook a new revision of the volume of letters, the Opus Epistolarum (H), to which a great number of new ones were now added. He was still, his preface tells us, averse from the publication, but nevertheless he took some care with the new edition, correcting it and dividing it into books for convenience of reference. Friends had urged him to arrange the letters in order of time”; but this he declined to do. He was largely influenced, no doubt, by unwillingness to spend labour on a task which he regarded as of little importance; nor would he even arrange them according to subject, alleging as his reason that so they would lose the charm of variety. Letters were to him elegant literature, not material for history. He consented, however, to add dates and places to letters where they were missing, so far as he could recall them. These additions are almost entirely of year-dates, and an examination of them shows conclusively that his memory could not be relied on. Out of over 200 thus supplied more than half are wrong, and in the dates of his life before 1511 the proportion of correct ones is barely one-fourth. After this there is a change. A volume of letters, mostly recent, appears almost every year, and if a preface is added, the protestations disappear. In the summer of 1531, when Erasmus was very busy and worried about a new house, into which he had been forced to move, he sent a number of letters to Basle for Herwagen to print, with the title Zpistolae Floridae (J), but the editor showed himself lacking in discretion, and many passages were left in which Erasmus would have wished suppressed. Accordingly he had the volume reprinted at Freiburg under his own eye in the following year. Five letters and the preface were omitted, considerable expurgations were made elsewhere, and new letters added. The title, Epistolae Palaconaeot (KX), discloses the nature of the contents. In 1534 a few more were printed at the end of one of his treatises, (L); and after his return to Basle he went through his papers, and selected another handful for publication with a forthcoming volume (M), which terminates with an expostulatory preface, complaining of the liberties taken with his writings. In this he states that in his latter years he had been less careful to have his letters copied, a statement which is corroborated by the composition of the volume, where out of twenty letters only six are from his pen, in marked contrast to the volumes subsequent to the Æpistole elegantes, in which the preponderance had always been the other way. But the correspondence of his last years, which was published by him or his executors, is altogether scanty, there being only seventy-two letters for the years 1532-6. In the collected edition of Erasmus’ works, prepared by his executors, the volume of letters was the first to appear (N), in 1538. It seems to have sold rapidly, for it was reprinted in 1541 (N°), and again in 1558 (N°). These three volumes are for the most part substantially the same. All the earlier editions were reprinted 21 Cf. EE. 61 and 73.
