I use the London folio of 1642, where the letter to Hessus, the Fifth of the Twenty-sixth book, will be found at col. 1407-10. I wish Mr Nichols’ excellent rearrangement had been available. But even its first volume only appeared when this book was in the printer’s hands. Footnote 15: Hessus, it may be not superfluous to say, was one of the authors of the _Epistolæ Obscurorum_, and in verse one of the very best Humanists of Germany. ----- There is a very curious, half modest and severe, half confident criticism of his own verses in ii. 22. He admits that there is nothing “tumultuous” in them, “no torrent overflowing its banks,” no _deinosis_: but claims elegance and Atticism. It would be perhaps unfair to attach the character of deliberate critical utterance to his effusive laudation of the style of Colet in an early letter (v. 4, dated 1498, but Mr Seebohm has thrown doubt on these dates, and Mr Nichols appears to be completely redistributing them), as _placidus sedatus inaffectatus, fontis limpidissimi in morem ditissimo e pectore scatens, æqualis, sui undique similis, apertus, simplex, modestiæ plenus, nihil usquam habens scabri contorti conturbati_. But it is interesting, and significant of his own performances, as is the comparison (v. 19) of Jerome and Cicero as masters of rhetoric. The somewhat intemperate and promiscuous contempt of mediæval writing which appears in the _Conflictus_ (_vide supra_) reappears, with the very same names mentioned, in an epistle (vii. 3), _Cornelio Suo_, of 1490, which, if it be rightly dated, must be long anterior to the Colloquy. But a much more important expression of critical opinion than any of these appears in v. 20 to Ammonius, where Erasmus gives his views on poetry at large. They are much what we should suspect or expect beforehand. Some folk, he says, think that a poem is not a poem unless you poke in all the gods from heaven, and from earth, and from under the earth. _He_ has always liked poetry which is at no great distance from prose—_but the best prose_.[16] He likes rhetorical poetry and poetical rhetoric. He does not care for far-fetched thoughts; let the poet stick to his subject, but give fair attention to smoothness of versification. “Prose and sense,” in short: with a little rhetoric and versification added. ----- Footnote 16: Mihi semper placuit carmen quod a prosa, sed optima, non longe recederet.—_Op. cit._, col. 420. ----- But on such matters he always touches lightly, and with little elaboration; and to see where his real interest lay we have but to turn to the above-quoted verbal discussions with Budæus on the one hand, to the minute and well-known account of More’s life and conversation given to Hutten in x. 30 on the other. Nor do I think that it is worth while to extend to the remaining two-thirds of the letters the more exact examination which has here been given to the first third or thereabouts.[17] ----- Footnote 17: