"If anyone cares to make the trial he will find Erasmus serving the See of Rome with his whole heart and especially Leo the tenth, to whose piety he is well aware how much he is indebted." Precisely the same tone of nervous anxiety about himself appears in a letter to Cardinal Campeggio, the papal legate in England.[125] He assures him that, so far as in him lay, he has tried to maintain the cause of Christ and the Church. Of course he cannot please everyone, but he has been satisfied with the praise of the best men from Pope Leo down. [125] iii.¹, 436. "But see," he cries, "the perverse and ungrateful ill-will of some men. They do not trust to writings and arguments, but attack me with slanderous tricks. Whatever books come out in these days, in which anybody is too free with his pranks, they put it upon me. There appeared the _Nemo_--for that is the name of a certain silly book; they charged me with it and would have made out their case if the angry author had not appeared and claimed his work for himself. There came out certain foolish letters and there were plenty of people to say I had helped to write them. Finally there came--I know not with what parentage--a work of Martin Luther, an author as unknown to me as the most unknown person in the world; I have not yet read the book through and yet at the very beginning they kept saying it was my work, the truth being that not one stroke in it is mine." He begs Campeggio to contradict these scandalous lies, and to rest assured that he never has written and never will write books of this sort. The cardinal's reply was as friendly and reassuring as could be wished, but may interest us especially because it makes no direct reference to the Lutheran movement. To Pope Leo Erasmus wrote in regard to the second edition of his New Testament.[126] The first edition had been, he says, well received by all but very few. His description of these few critics is highly characteristic: [126] iii.¹, 490. "Some are too stupid to be convinced by reasonable argument; some too conceited to be willing to learn better; some too obstinate to give up their position, bad though it be; some too old to hope ever to do anything worth doing; some so ambitious that they cannot bear to seem to have been ignorant of anything; but all are men of such a kind, that it is not worth while to try for their approval. Indeed that was a clever saying of Seneca: 'There are people by whom it is better to be abused than praised.'