These uncles and guardians had no idea of what to do with their two little wards and after the mother had died, the children never had a home of their own. First of all they were sent to a famous school in Deventer, where several of the teachers belonged to the Society of the Brothers of the Common Life, but if we are to judge by the letters which Erasmus wrote later in life, these young men were only “common” in a very different sense of the word. Next the two boys were separated and the younger was taken to Gouda, where he was placed under the immediate supervision of the head-master of the Latin school, who was also one of the three guardians appointed to administer his slender inheritance. If that school in the days of Erasmus was as bad as when I visited it four centuries later, I can only feel sorry for the poor kid. And to make matters worse, the guardians by this time had wasted every penny of his money and in order to escape prosecution (for the old Dutch courts were strict upon such matters) they hurried the infant into a cloister, rushed him into holy orders and bade him be happy because “now his future was secure.” The mysterious mills of history eventually ground this terrible experience into something of great literary value. But I hate to think of the many terrible years this sensitive youngster was forced to spend in the exclusive company of the illiterate boors and thick-fingered rustics who during the end of the Middle Ages made up the population of fully half of all monasteries. Fortunately the laxity of discipline at Steyn permitted Erasmus to spend most of his time among the Latin manuscripts which a former abbot had collected and which lay forgotten in the library. He absorbed those volumes until he finally became a walking encyclopedia of classical learning. In later years this stood him in good stead. Forever on the move, he rarely was within reach of a reference library. But that was not necessary. He could quote from memory. Those who have ever seen the ten gigantic folios which contain his collected works, or who have managed to read through part of them (life is so short nowadays) will appreciate what a “knowledge of the classics” meant in the fifteenth century. Of course, eventually Erasmus was able to leave his old monastery. People like him are never influenced by circumstances. They make their own circumstances and they make them out of the most unlikely material. And the rest of his life Erasmus was a free man, searching restlessly after a spot where he might work without being disturbed by a host of admiring friends. But not until the fateful hour when with an appeal to the “lieve God” of his childhood he allowed his soul to slip into the slumber of death, did he enjoy a moment of that “true leisure” which has always appeared as the highest good to those who have followed the footsteps of Socrates and Zeno and which so few of them have ever found.