om, bed,
and heart. Nor was this cult of fervent friendship restricted to the
sphere of aristocratic life. It was among the specific characteristics
of the _devotio moderna_, as, for the rest, it seems from its very
nature to be inseparably bound up with pietism. To observe one another
with sympathy, to watch and note each other's inner life, was a
customary and approved occupation among the brethren of the Common Life
and the Windesheim monks. And though Steyn and Sion were not of the
Windesheim congregation, the spirit of the _devotio moderna_ was
prevalent there.

As for Erasmus himself, he has rarely revealed the foundation of his
character more completely than when he declared to Servatius: 'My mind
is such that I think nothing can rank higher than friendship in this
life, nothing should be desired more ardently, nothing should be
treasured more jealously'. A violent affection of a similar nature
troubled him even at a later date when the purity of his motives was
questioned. Afterwards he speaks of youth as being used to conceive a
fervent affection for certain comrades. Moreover, the classic examples
of friends, Orestes and Pylades, Damon and Pythias, Theseus and
Pirithous, as also David and Jonathan, were ever present before his
mind's eye. A young and very tender heart, marked by many feminine
traits, replete with all the sentiment and with all the imaginings of
classic literature, who was debarred from love and found himself placed
against his wish in a coarse and frigid environment, was likely to
become somewhat excessive in his affections.

He was obliged to moderate them. Servatius would have none of so jealous
and exacting a friendship and, probably at the cost of more humiliation
and shame than appears in his letters, young Erasmus resigns himself, to
be more guarded in expressing his feelings in the future. The
sentimental Erasmus disappears for good and presently makes room for the
witty latinist, who surpasses his older friends, and chats with them
about poetry and literature, advises them about their Latin style, and
lectures them if necessary.

The opportunities for acquiring the new taste for classic antiquity
cannot have been so scanty at Deventer, and in the monastery itself, as
Erasmus afterwards would have us believe, considering the authors he
already knew at this time. We may conjecture, also, that the books left
by his father, possibly brought by him from Italy, contributed to
Erasmus's c