These peregrinations have often been described and I need not repeat them here in detail. Wherever two or more men lived together in the name of true wisdom, there Erasmus was sooner or later bound to make his appearance. He studied in Paris, where as a poor scholar he almost died of hunger and cold. He taught in Cambridge. He printed books in Basel. He tried (quite in vain) to carry a spark of enlightenment into that stronghold of orthodox bigotry, the far-famed University of Louvain. He spent much of his time in London and took the degree of Doctor of Divinity in the University of Turin. He was familiar with the Grand Canal of Venice and cursed as familiarly about the terrible roads of Zeeland as those of Lombardy. The sky, the parks, the walks and the libraries of Rome made such a profound impression upon him that even the waters of Lethe could not wash the Holy City out of his memory. He was offered a liberal pension if he would only move to Venice and whenever a new university was opened, he was sure to be honored with a call to whatever chair he wished to take or to no chair at all, provided he would grace the Campus with his occasional presence. But he steadily refused all such invitations because they seemed to contain a threat of permanence and dependency. Before all things he wanted to be free. He preferred a comfortable room to a bad one, he preferred amusing companions to dull ones, he knew the difference between the good rich wine of the land called Burgundy and the thin red ink of the Apennines, but he wanted to live life on his own terms and this he could not do if he had to call any man “master.” The rôle which he had chosen for himself was really that of an intellectual search-light. No matter what object appeared above the horizon of contemporary events, Erasmus immediately let the brilliant rays of his intellect play upon it, did his best to make his neighbors see the thing as it really was, denuded of all frills and divested of that “folly,” that ignorance which he hated so thoroughly. That he was able to do this during the most turbulent period of our history, that he managed to escape the fury of the Protestant fanatics while keeping himself aloof from the fagots of his friends of the Inquisition, this is the one point in his career upon which he has been most often condemned. Posterity seems to have a veritable passion for martyrdom as long as it applies to the ancestors. “Why didn’t this Dutchman stand up boldly for Luther and take his chance together with the other reformers?” has been a question which seems to have puzzled at least twelve generations of otherwise intelligent citizens. The answer is, “Why should he?”