Far and wide the missiles containing the mustard-gas of his wit were shot into the enemy’s country. And those Erasmian bombs were of a very dangerous variety. At a first glance they looked harmless enough. There was no sputtering of a tell-tale fuse. They had the appearance of an amusing new variety of fire-cracker, but God help those who took them home and allowed the children to play with them. The poison was sure to get into their little minds and it was of such a persistent nature that four centuries have not sufficed to make the race immune against the effects of the drug. It is strange that such a man should have been born in one of the dullest towns of the mudbanks which are situated along the eastern coast of the North Sea. In the fifteenth century those water soaked lands had not yet attained the glories of an independent and fabulously rich commonwealth. They formed a group of little insignificant principalities, somewhere on the outskirts of civilized society. They smelled forever of herring, their chief article of export. And if ever they attracted a visitor, it was some helpless mariner whose ship had been wrecked upon their dismal shores. But the very horror of a childhood spent among such unpleasant surroundings may have spurred this curious infant into that fury of activity which eventually was to set him free and make him one of the best known men of his time. From the beginning of life, everything was against him. He was an illegitimate child. The people of the Middle Ages, being on an intimate and friendly footing both with God and with nature, were a great deal more sensible about such children than we are. They were sorry. Such things ought not to occur and of course they greatly disapproved. For the rest, however, they were too simple-minded to punish a helpless creature in a cradle for a sin which most certainly was not of its own making. The irregularity of his birth certificate inconvenienced Erasmus only in so far as both his father and his mother seem to have been exceedingly muddle-headed citizens, totally incapable of handling the situation and leaving their children to the care of relatives who were either boobs or scoundrels.