ooks of great value for the history of
scholarship; many of them requiring to be dated with more precision
than is attainable on the surface. It will be a signal service to
learning when a trained bibliographer takes Beatus Rhenanus' books in
hand and gives us a scientific catalogue.

These were some of the friends who were in Basle when Erasmus first
began to think of sending his work there to be printed. By the summer
of 1514 the preliminary negotiations had been satisfactorily concluded
and he set out. The story which he tells of his arrival is well known.
Amorbach was now dead; so he marched into the printing-house and asked
for Froben. 'I handed him a letter from Erasmus, saying that I was a
familiar friend of his, and that he had charged me to arrange for the
publication of his works; that any undertaking I made would be as
valid as if made by him: finally, that I was so like Erasmus that to
see me was to see him. He laughed and saw through the joke. His
father-in-law, old Lachner, paid my bill at the inn, and carried me
off, horse and baggage to his house.'

He was not at first sure whether he would stay: he might get the work
better done at Venice or at Rome. But the attractions of the printer's
house and circle were not to be resisted; and gradually, one after
another, the books which he had brought were undertaken by Froben, a
new edition of the _Adagia_, Seneca, the New Testament, Jerome. The
way in which the printing was carried out illustrates the critical
standards of the age. Erasmus was absent from Basle during the greater
part of the time when Seneca was coming through the press; and the
proofs were corrected by Beatus Rhenanus and a young man named Nesen.
Under such circumstances a modern author would feel that he had only
himself to thank for any defects in the book. Not so Erasmus. He boils
over with annoyance against the correctors for the blunders they let
pass. The idea that so magnificent a person as an editor or author
should correct proofs had not arisen. It was the business of the young
men who had been hired to do this drudgery; and all blame rested with
them. So far as the evidence goes, it was the same all through
Erasmus' life. In the case of one of his most virulent apologies
(1520) he says that he corrected all the proofs himself; but from the
stress he lays on the loss of time involved, it is clear that he
regarded this as something exceptional, and not to be repeated. With
the _Adagi