[20] H. Kämmel, "Erasmus in Deventer," in _Neue Jahrbücher für Philologie und Paedagogik_, 1874, Bd. 110, p. 305, quotes from Wm. Bates, an English editor of Erasmus' _Compendium Vitæ_ in 1687, the desperate conjecture that this phrase refers to some manual prepared by the father of Erasmus! I suspect--assuming that we have a correct text--that the reference is to some forgotten Latin phrase-book, beginning perhaps with the words "_pater meus_." "_Tempora_" can hardly refer to anything but the tenses of the grammar. The head-master of Deventer at the time was a German, Alexander Hegius, from whom and from John Sintheim, one of the teachers, Erasmus says the school was beginning to get a glimmer of the great light, which, spreading from Italy, was enlightening the world. Erasmus' younger friend and biographer, Beatus Rhenanus, speaks of this Hegius as a man of very moderate learning, who knew no Greek at all, but says that he was open to the merits of the learning he did not share and gladly accepted the instruction of the younger German scholar, Rudolf Agricola, who had just returned from Italy fresh with the eager enthusiasm of that land of all promise. Erasmus fancied that the most he got out of his Deventer days was a "certain odor of better learning" which came to him from his older mates, who enjoyed the direct teaching of Sintheim, and from the occasional hearing of Hegius, who on feast days lectured to the whole school. There can be no doubt, however, that he had got on famously in Latin and made at least a beginning in Greek.[21] Beatus tells a very pretty story of Sintheim,--that having heard Erasmus recite, he kissed him and said, "Go on, Erasmus, you will some day reach the very summit of learning." [21] See in ii., 166, 167, the adage, "_quid cani et balneo_." After four years at Deventer an outbreak of the plague carried off the faithful mother and within a few weeks the father also, both just over forty years of age. Gerard, so Erasmus says, left a modest fortune, sufficient, if it had been properly husbanded, to provide for his own education at a university. The guardians, however, to whom he had intrusted his little property, the uncle Peter Winckel especially, were determined not to give the boy an academic training, but instead to turn him into the monastic life. Beatus speaks of Deventer as "a most prolific nursery of monks of every kind," and Erasmus employs this phrase, with every shade of anger and contempt, for the next institution in which his lot was to be cast.