have been of enormous importance for his
influence upon his times. For while Jerome reached tens of readers and
the New Testament hundreds, the _Moria_ and _Colloquies_ went out to
thousands. And their importance is heightened in that Erasmus has
nowhere else expressed himself so spontaneously.

In each of the Colloquies, even in the first purely formulary ones,
there is the sketch for a comedy, a novelette or a satire. There is
hardly a sentence without its 'point', an expression without a vivid
fancy. There are unrivalled niceties. The abbot of the _Abbatis et
eruditae colloquium_ is a Moliere character. It should be noticed how
well Erasmus always sustains his characters and his scenes, because he
_sees_ them. In 'The woman in childbed' he never forgets for a moment
that Eutrapelus is an artist. At the end of 'The game of knucklebones',
when the interlocutors, after having elucidated the whole nomenclature
of the Latin game of knuckle-bones, are going to play themselves,
Carolus says: 'but shut the door first, lest the cook should see us
playing like two boys'.

As Holbein illustrated the _Moria_, we should wish to possess the
_Colloquia_ with illustrations by Brueghel, so closely allied is
Erasmus's witty clear vision of incidents to that of this great master.
The procession of drunkards on Palm Sunday, the saving of the
shipwrecked crew, the old men waiting for the travelling cart while the
drivers are still drinking, all these are Dutch genre pieces of the best
sort.

We like to speak of the realism of the Renaissance. Erasmus is certainly
a realist in the sense of having an insatiable hunger for knowledge of
the tangible world. He wants to know things and their names: the
particulars of each thing, be it never so remote, such as those terms of
games and rules of games of the Romans. Read carefully the description
of the decorative painting on the garden-house of the _Convivium
religiosum_: it is nothing but an object lesson, a graphic
representation of the forms of reality.

In its joy over the material universe and the supple, pliant word, the
Renaissance revels in a profusion of imagery and expressions. The
resounding enumerations of names and things, which Rabelais always
gives, are not unknown to Erasmus, but he uses them for intellectual and
useful purposes. In _De copia verborum ac rerum_ one feat of varied
power of expression succeeds another--he gives fifty ways of saying:
'Your letter has given me