It is hard to fancy that Erasmus, in his thoughts of Italy, can have failed to be drawn by the anticipation of living thus bodily in the presence of the human world from which he drew his literary inspiration and toward which all his serious thought went back as to its natural source. Yet the fact is that neither in the anticipation nor in the reality of his Italian journey do we find such reference to these things as would warrant us in thinking that they formed any essential part of his ideas about Italy. That sense of an overwhelming grandeur, a something indescribably greater than all that had come since, which has fallen upon so many an Italian traveller, seems to have been entirely absent in his case. When Goethe entered Italy, it was with bated breath and reverent awe at the stupendous remains of a civilisation whose influence was even then potent in the lives of men. So far as Erasmus has left us any witness of himself his mind was occupied solely with the immediate profit of the moment: his doctor's degree, his new publisher, the petty comforts and discomforts of daily life. [Illustration: FRONTISPIECE AND TITLE-PAGE FROM "L'ÉLOGE DE LA FOLIE," PUBLISHED AT LEYDEN IN 1715.] Still more curious is his attitude towards that other aspect of Italy which might have been expected to impress him even more. As a man of the Renaissance one might have looked to find Erasmus, even before his departure, in correspondence with some of the lights of the later Italian Humanism; yet, so far as we know, he went over the Alps a stranger, except for the slight reputation of his own writings, and chiefly of the Adages. The enormous activity of all those great producers in every field of art, who have made the turning-point of the fifteenth to the sixteenth century one of the great epochs in human history, seems simply to have escaped his notice. We do not hear of it as attracting him from the North; when he is in the midst of it, it finds no echo in his correspondence, and when he leaves it, there is nothing in his later writing to show that it had greatly affected him. With the really greatest men of the land he seems not to have come into any intimate personal relation, and he certainly avoided here, as he had always done elsewhere, any complication with political or social movements of any sort. Our information in regard to the Italian journey and residence is curiously meagre. In the great collection of Erasmus' letters, there are but a half-dozen in the three years from 1506 to 1509. M. Nolhac[67] has published four others written by Erasmus to Aldus, his printer, but these latter are occupied almost wholly with unimportant business details. Four of the former group are written from Paris just after the party had left England and give us only some scattered hints as to Erasmus' departure for Italy. [67] P. de Nolhac, _Érasme en Italie, Étude sur un épisode de la Renaissance, avec douze lettres inédites d'Érasme_, 1888.