It would, however, be a glaring omission if the critical position of Erasmus himself were not set forth at some length.[10] [Sidenote: _Erasmus._] Standing as he does, the most eminent literary figure of Europe on the bridge of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, nothing if not critical as he is in his general temperament, and on the textual and exegetical, if not on the strictly literary sides of the Art, one of its great historical figures—his absence from this gallery would be justly regarded as inexcusable. And if his voluminous work does not yield us very much within the more special and fully enfranchising lines of our system, it might be regarded as a sufficient answer to say that the imperfection of the vernaculars, his own concentration on particular forms of Biblical and patristic text-criticism, and that peculiar cosmopolitanism which made him practically of no country at all, served to draw him away from a practice in which he would, but for these circumstances and conditions, have certainly indulged. ----- Footnote 10: Erasmus is still only readable as a whole, or in combination of his really important literary work, in the folios of Beatus Rhenanus (8 vols., Basle, 1540-1) or Le Clerc (10 vols., Lyons, 1703-6). It is a thousand pities that this more important literary work, at least, has not been re-edited together accessibly and cheaply. ----- It may, however, be doubted whether Erasmus would ever have made a capital figure as a purely literary critic. Very great man of letters as he was, and almost wholly literary as were his interests, those interests were suspiciously directed towards the applied rather than the pure aspects of literature—were, in short, _per se_ rather scientific than literary proper. It is at least noteworthy that the _Ciceronianus_ (though Erasmus was undoubtedly on the right side in it) was directed against a purely literary folly, against an exaggeration of one of the tastes and appetites which spur on the critic. And it is almost enough to read the _Adagia_ and _Apophthegmata_—books much forgotten now, but written with enormous zest and pains by him, and received with corresponding attention and respect by two whole centuries at least—to see how much is there left out which a literary critic _pur sang_ could not but have said.