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608 APPENDIX VIII
consideration of the circumstances under which the letter-book came
into being. The boys who wrote it were not advanced scholars, and
doubtless were often in a hurry to get their irksome task finished ;
of the letters which they copied, too, some at least must have been
crabbed and hard to decipher. It is not surprising, therefore, that
in addition to the common faults of copying a number of impossible
words and unreadable sentences are found, which invite correction
by an editor ; and the character of the copyists needs to be continually
borne in mind in criticizing the text of letters which emanate from
this source.
Leclerc says in his preface that the Deventer letter-book supplied
him with 322 unpublished letters. To the 304 mentioned above
may be added 4 which he inserted in the Appendix, although they
had been printed already by the London editor; and thus I4
remain to be accounted for, which he found in the book, but which
are now lost. They covered some of the missing leaves, including
ff. 225-236 and 239, and 9 of them were autographs. From
the composition of the Appendix it is possible to trace them with
some degree of certainty.
Of the 517 letters which it contains 304 come, as we have seen,
from the Deventer book; 118 were already printed in the London
edition, but had been omitted by Leclere from the body of his work
because their dates would not accord with his arrangement ; 1, which
had escaped the London editor”, he found in the Basle folio of 1 541
(N°); and 43 more are in the Codex Rehdigeranus, 254, of the Town
Library at Breslau !. Out of the remaining 51, I9 are so directly
concerned with Erasmus’ Gouda friends” that they probably formed
a separate collection placed in Leclere’s hands by one of the persons
mentioned in his preface ; and from the prominent part oceupied by
William Herman it would seem as though the collector had chosen
out letters addressed or relating to Erasmus from a letter-book
belonging originally to Herman.
Some such collection as this was sold in April 1705 among the
books of Peter Francius, late Professor of History at Amsterdam,
with the description in the auction-catalogue *: ‘Cornelii Aurelii,
Herasmi, Dorpii et alior. Belgar. epistolae mss, in charta.’ This
manuscript, which has since unfortunately disappeared, may perhaps
have been that from which the Gouda letters came to Leclere. The
coincidence in time is noticeable; for it was just then that the
Deventer book reached him and necessitated a reconstruction of his
Appendix. If the identification is accepted, we must suppose
1 APP. 84, 192, 239, 392.
° App. 515; see p. 597.
16 In the Breslau codex, which came
into the library in 1645, all these
letters are originals and with one
exception (App. 469) they are com¬
plete ; but for a number of them Leclerc
prints only fragments. With App. 469,
however, the manuscript begins at the
same point as Leclere’s version. For
the other letters which he prints in an
incomplete form it is possible that he
had before him not the originals, but
a series of extracts made in a common¬
place-book.
7 Epp. 5, 6, 11, 10, 17, 19, 21, 24, 25
27, 33-8, 84, 92, 142; LB. App. 394,
413-20, 436, 447-9, 454, 488-92.
18 Of the last nine letters eight are
by him. È
1° Catalogus . . . librorum Petri Francii,
Amsterdam, Wetstein, 1705, P- 129.
I owe this information to Dr. P. C.
Molhuysen.