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682 APPENDIX XIII their historical value ; for in that case we might fairly expect to find them carefully sorted out and the letters especially placed in chronological order. It seems more as though it were a congeries brought together almost haphazard by some one desirous of gathering and yet hardly heeding what he gathered: as for instance Lambert Comannus, Erasmus’ last secretary, might have laid his hands hastily on such papers as he could find after his master’s death. For this suggestion there is some confirmation in the fact that, notwithstanding what has been said, there is a certain degree of arrangement about the papers. In the Ecclesiastes and other compositions the displacement which occurs is not of single sheets but, as has been shown above, of groups; and again among the letters there is some natural grouping. Thus the three letters which are printed in the De Praeparatione, 1534 (L), occur together at the beginning; and of the 18 which appear in the Epistolae Floridae, 1531 (J), 17 are found in a continuous series, which at times follows very closely the order in which they are printed in the book. This orderly and yet disordered arrangement is just what might be expected in a collection hurriedly gathered during the necessary dispositions which follow death; and it is not difficult to suppose that the papers may subsequently have passed from hand to hand without much scrutiny until they reached the protection of the Copenhagen Library. The collection has considerable value in the light that it throws on Erasmus’ practice in the writing and preservation of his correspondence. All the letters are rough drafts, not a single one having been actually dispatched, and a few being back to back on the same sheet. There is thus proof of a fact for which there is no other direct evidence, that Erasmus in his later years usually wrote rough drafts of his letters, and that these were copied fair by his secretaries for dispatch. A number of fair copies written by secretaries are of course in existence ; but except for those under consideration here no rough drafts are known. This later practice is in direct contrast to that of the period 1516-8, which is represented by the Deventer Letter-book (App. 8), when he commonly wrote his letters for dispatch and his secretaries copied them for preservation. The letters bear various marks of revision, besides the corrections naturally made at the time of first writing. Two of the letters of 1524 have been corrected. One, f. 243, was unquestionably revised by Erasmus, but as in one place there are two divergences from the Opus Epistolarum, 1529 (H), the edition in which it was first printed, it seems doubtful whether the corrections were made with a view to its publication there. More probably they were made à few years earlier, and subsequently improved at the time of printing. The other letter of 1524, f. 239, presents difficulties. There are six corrections by a contemporary hand, which might be Erasmus’, but might equally well be that of his secretary. Here again the corrections cannot have been made with a view to H, for of the numerous changes made there none that are really important are found in these six. So that here too we may attribute them to a revision at an earlier time. Three letters of 1528 show revision, of a different kind in each case. In one, f. 198, Erasmus is clearly the author of the changes,
