hief of whom was Peter
Winkel, schoolmaster of Goude; and the fortune left him was amply
sufficient for his support, if his executors had faithfully discharged
their trust Although he was fit for the university, his guardians were
averse to sending him there, as they designed him for a monastic life,
and therefore removed him to Bois-le-duc, where, he says, he lost near
three years, living in a Franciscan convent The professor of humanity in
this convent, admiring his rising genius, daily importuned him to take
the habit, and be of their order. Erasmus had no great inclination for
the cloister; not that he had the least dislike to the severities of
a pious life, but he could not reconcile himself to the monastic
profession; he therefore urged his rawness of age, and desired farther
to consider better of the matter. The plague spreading in those parts,
and he having struggled a long time with a quartan ague, obliged him to
return home.

His guardians employed those about him to use all manner of arguments to
prevail on him to enter the order of monk; sometimes threatening, and at
other times making use of flattery and fair speeches. When Winkel, his
guardian, found him not to be moved from his resolution, he told
him that he threw up his guardianship from that moment Young Erasmus
replied, that he took him at his word, since he was old enough now to
look out for himself. When Winkel found that threats did not avail, he
employed his brother, who was the other guardian, to see what he could
effect by fair means. Thus he was surrounded by them and their agents
on all sides. By mere accident, Erasmus went to visit a religious house
belonging to the same order, in Emaus or Steyn, near Goude, where he met
with one Cornelius, who had been his companion at Deventer; and though
he had not himself taken the habit, he was perpetually preaching up the
advantages of a religious life, as the convenience of noble libraries,
the helps of learned conversation, retirement from the noise and folly
of the world, and the like. Thus at last he was induced to pitch upon
this convent. Upon his admission they fed him with great promises, to
engage him to take the holy cloth; and though he found almost everything
fall short of his expectation, yet his necessities, and the usage he was
threatened with if he abandoned their order, prevailed with him, after
his year of probation, to profess himself a member of their fraternity.
Not long after this,