It is possible, one laments, that the rascal may get off after all: the writer hears that worthy Inquisitor Hochstratten’s money is almost exhausted, and that he has scarcely enough left for the necessary bribery at Rome; it is to be hoped that he will get a further supply. It is quite impossible to translate the epistles and retain the original flavour of the language,—a mixture of ecclesiastical phrases, vernacular idioms and words, and the worst mediæval Latin. Of course, the letters contain much that is very objectionable: they attack the character of men, and even of women; but that was an ordinary feature of the Humanism of the times. They were undoubtedly successful in covering the opponents of Reuchlin with ridicule, more especially when some of the obscurantists failed to see the satire, and looked upon the letters as genuine accounts of the views they sympathised with. Some of the mendicant friars in England welcomed a book against Reuchlin, and a Dominican prior in Brabant bought several copies to send to his superiors. The authorship of these famous letters is not thoroughly known; probably several Humanist pens were at work. It is generally admitted that they came from the Humanist circle at Erfurt, and that the man who planned the book and wrote most of the letters was John Jaeger of Dornheim (Crotus Rubeanus). They were long ascribed to Ulrich von Hutten; some of the letters may have come from his pen—one did certainly. These _Epistolæ Obscurorum Virorum_, when compared with the _Encomium Moriæ_ of Erasmus, show how immeasurably inferior the ordinary German Humanist was to the scholar of the Low Countries.(45) § 11. Ulrich von Hutten.