Then comes in the stove again. Hutten was, as well he might be, rather more angered than appeased by this missive, and soon printed his _Expostulatio cum Erasmo_.[146] [146] _Hutteni opera_, ii., 180. Erasmus had had to hear a good many bitter words in the years just past, but never such stinging reproaches as these. Doubtless the personal element played its part in adding a final goad to Hutten's indignation; but the _Expostulatio_ is far from being a mere personal reply to real or fancied wrongs. It is a scathing review of the whole attitude of Erasmus towards the reform. The chief note of the charge is cowardice, deceit, and time-serving. The underlying assumption throughout is that Erasmus was really in sympathy with the whole attack upon the church order from Reuchlin onwards. This assumption is proved out of his own mouth. At every new stage of the reform he was shown to have expressed approval, only to change approval into condemnation as soon as there was a prospect that anything would be done. So, on the other hand, Hutten shows Erasmus attacking all the enemies of reform, the pope, Aleander, Hoogstraaten, and the rest, and then changing his tone to a weak, snivelling flattery as soon as he saw any danger in prospect. A few specimens will illustrate the vigour and openness of Hutten's method. After the twistings and turnings of Erasmus' style, his reads like a model of strength and directness. "Because of my health, or for some other reason, I could not be away from my stove long enough to speak with you once or twice in the whole fifty days I spent at Basel, though I would often stand talking with friends in the midst of the market-place for three hours at a time! Well, that is quite like your sincerity, to take a perfectly simple thing and give it a false colouring and to cover up the truth with an empty show. "As I thought the matter over attentively several reasons occurred to me why, perhaps, you might thus have fallen away from yourself. First, your insatiable ambition for fame, your greed for glory, which makes it impossible for you to bear the growing powers of anyone else; and then the lack of steadiness in your mind, which has always displeased me in you as unworthy of your greatness and led me to believe that you were terror-stricken by the threats of these men.... Finally I explain it to myself by the pettiness of your mind, which makes you afraid of everything and easily thrown into despair; for you had so little faith in the progress of our cause, especially when you saw that some of the chief princes of Germany were conspiring against us, that straightway you thought you must not only desert us, but must also seek their good-will by every possible means." Referring to Erasmus' charge that the Lutherans had set on foot a rumour that Hoogstraaten had burned his books, in order to make him write against the Church, Hutten says: