much pleasure,' or, 'I think that it is going
to rain'. The aesthetic impulse is here that of a theme and variations:
to display all the wealth and mutations of the logic of language.
Elsewhere, too, Erasmus indulges this proclivity for accumulating the
treasures of his genius; he and his contemporaries can never restrain
themselves from giving all the instances instead of one: in _Ratio verae
theologiae_, in _De pronuntiatione_, in _Lingua_, in _Ecclesiastes_. The
collections of _Adagia_, _Parabolae_, and _Apophthegmata_ are altogether
based on this eagerness of the Renaissance (which, by the way, was an
inheritance of the Middle Ages themselves) to luxuriate in the wealth of
the tangible world, to revel in words and things.

The senses are open for the nice observation of the curious. Though
Erasmus does not know that need of proving the secrets of nature, which
inspired a Leonardo da Vinci, a Paracelsus, a Vesalius, he is also, by
his keen observation, a child of his time. For peculiarities in the
habits and customs of nations he has an open eye. He notices the gait of
Swiss soldiers, how dandies sit, how Picards pronounce French. He
notices that in old pictures the sitters are always represented with
half-closed eyes and tightly shut lips, as signs of modesty, and how
some Spaniards still honour this expression in life, while German art
prefers lips pouting as for a kiss. His lively sense of anecdote, to
which he gives the rein in all his writings, belongs here.

And, in spite of all his realism, the world which Erasmus sees and
renders, is not altogether that of the sixteenth century. Everything is
veiled by Latin. Between the author's mind and reality intervenes his
antique diction. At bottom the world of his mind is imaginary. It is a
subdued and limited sixteenth-century reality which he reflects.
Together with its coarseness he lacks all that is violent and direct in
his times. Compared with the artists, with Luther and Calvin, with the
statesmen, the navigators, the soldiers and the scientists, Erasmus
confronts the world as a recluse. It is only the influence of Latin. In
spite of all his receptiveness and sensitiveness, Erasmus is never fully
in contact with life. All through his work not a bird sings, not a wind
rustles.

But that reserve or fear of directness is not merely a negative quality.
It also results from a consciousness of the indefiniteness of the ground
of all things, from the awe of the ambig