Page 632 [632]
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 re¬
printed 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 Palaco¬
naeot (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 con¬
trast to the volumes subsequent to the Æpistole elegantes, in which the
preponderance had always been the other way. But the correspon¬
dence 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.