The style of Erasmus is, considered as Latin, incorrect, sometimes even barbarous, and far removed from any classical model. But it has qualities far above purity. The best Italian Latin is but an echo and an imitation; like the painted glass which we put in our churches, it is an anachronism. Bembo, Sadoleto and the rest write purely in a dead language. Erasmus's Latin was a living and spoken tongue. Though Erasmus had passed nearly all his life in England, France and Germany, his conversation was Latin; and the language in which he talked about common things he wrote. Hence the spontaneity and naturalness of his page, its flavour of life and not of books. He writes from himself, and not out of Cicero. Hence, too, he spoiled nothing by anxious revision in terror lest some phrase not of the golden age should escape from his pen. He confesses apologetically to Christopher Longolius (_Ep._ iii. 63; 402) that it was his habit to extemporize all he wrote, and that this habit was incorrigible; "effundo verius quam scribo omnia." He complains that much reading of the works of St Jerome had spoiled his Latin; but, as Scaliger says (_Scalig^a 2^a_), "Erasmus's language is better than St Jerome's." The same critic, however, thought Erasmus would have done better "if he had kept more closely to the classical models." In the annals of classical learning Erasmus may be regarded as constituting an intermediate stage between the humanists of the Latin Renaissance and the learned men of the age of Greek scholarship, between Angelo Poliziano and Joseph Scaliger. Erasmus, though justly styled by Muretus (_Varr. Lectt._ 7, 15) "eruditus sane vir, ac multae lectionis," was not a "learned" man in the special sense of the word--not an "erudit." He was more than this; he was the "man of letters"--the first who had appeared in Europe since the fall of the Roman empire. His acquirements were vast, and they were all brought to bear upon the life of his day. He did not make a study apart of antiquity for its own sake, but used it as an instrument of culture. He did not worship, imitate and reproduce the classics, like the Latin humanists who preceded him; he did not master them and reduce them to a special science, as did the French Hellenists who succeeded him. He edited many authors, it is true, but he had neither the means of forming a text, nor did he attempt to do so. In editing a father, or a classic, he had in view the practical utility of the general reader, not the accuracy required by the gild of scholars. "His Jerome," says J. Scaliger, "is full of sad blunders" (_Scalig^a 2^a_). Even Julien Garnier could discover that Erasmus "falls in his haste into grievous error in his Latin version of St Basil, though his Latinity is superior to that of the other translators" (Pref. in _Opp. St. Bas._, 1721). It must be remembered that the commercial interests of Froben's press led to the introduction of Erasmus's name on