It is not a sufficient answer to say that joy in outward nature is a purely recent emotion. The whole art of the Renaissance is the witness that men had long since escaped from this form of mediæval bondage and were quite able to understand that they were living in a good world, made for their delight and not wholly under the dominion of Satan. A journey on horseback across the Alps! and, so far as we know, this prince of learned men, who could discourse so eloquently upon every human feeling, had not one emotion beyond a desire to get across as soon as possible and a lively sense of the comforts and discomforts of his inns. [68] _Carmen equestre vel potius Alpestre_, iv., 755. [69] See page 226. If a doctor's degree was one of Erasmus' objects in coming to Italy, he certainly lost no time in fulfilling it. The degree was conferred on him at Turin September 4, 1506.[70] Erasmus took especial pains to state in at least four letters that he took this degree to please his friends, not himself; but made no objection to its immediate use in his publications. From Turin he went on to Bologna where he proposed to settle for his own studies, as well as for those of his young pupils. The country was in a distressing state of confusion and that of a kind especially offensive to Erasmus. War was bad enough at the best, but a papal war was a scandal to the name of Christianity, and a fighting pope was to him a monster of iniquity. He held his pen quietly enough at the time, but the impression of this pope, Julius II., leading a campaign for the recovery of Bologna from the French never quite left him. It served him for a text whenever he felt free to speak his mind on the subject of war or on the decline of virtue in the church. A turn in affairs gave Bologna to Julius II. and furnished to Erasmus the opportunity of seeing the triumphal entry of the pope into his city. He simply reports the event to Servatius, his old comrade at Steyn, without mentioning that he had witnessed it, and only long afterward casually refers to his presence, in the course of a formal defence against the charge of abusing the papacy. [70] See the diploma in W. Vischer, _Erasmiana_, Basel, 1876. "In the passage ... I compare the triumphal entries (_triumphos_) which, in my presence, Julius II. made first at Bologna and afterwards at Rome, with the majesty of the apostles who converted the world by divine truth and who so abounded in miracles that the sick were healed by their very shadow, and I give the preference to this apostolic splendour; yet I say nothing abusive against those [other] triumphs, although to speak frankly I gazed upon them not without a silent groan."