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PREFACE As this work proceeds I have an increasing sense of what it owes to others. Erasmus was a great traveller; and his letters, too, have wandered into many lands—not always those to which they were addressed. It is a continual pleasure to recall not merely the ready welcome accorded to us in the numerous libraries and archives it has been necessary to visit, but also the sympathetic interest which has led these welcoming friends to remember our studies, and to report, and even to make, discoveries likely to be of value. The most important of these has been contributed by Professor Roersch of Ghent; who found a clue which enabled him to trace the de Ram collection of Erasmus’ letters to Schetus and Vander Noot in the possession of M. Louis Nève of Louvain. Though engaged himself in widely different pursuits, M. Nève at once recognized the importance of the discovery, and with the utmost generosity allowed Professor Roersch to place them in our hands at Ghent in June 1910, to be copied. Since then, with the instinet of a true scholar, he has made it easy for them to pass in two divisions into the British Museum and the Bodleian, rather than submit them to be scattered by the chances of the market-place. For other discoveries, less important, perhaps, but scarcely less acceptable, for the loan of books, for advice given, and for researches cheerfully undertaken our thanks are due : in Belgium to MM. Ferdinand Vander Haeghen (}) and R. Vanden Berghe, to Fr. L. Rousseau, to Dr. H. de Vocht, and again to Professor Roersch; in France to MM. Delcourt and de Ricci and Ph. Renouard and Weiss, the first of whom has repeatedly helped in inquiries, unhappily fruitless, after the letters of More used by Stapleton at Douay ; in Germany to Dr. Bellesheim and Dr. Miiller of Aachen, Professor Hippe of Breslau, Dr. Keussen of Cologne, Dr. Ritter of Emden, Dr. Reicke of Nuremberg, Dr. Claussen of Rostock; a 2
