eat; in spite
of thy delicate foibles, thou shalt always live in my memory; and dear
to me shall be the possession of thy intellectual labours! No pen has
yet done justice to thy life.[300] How I love to trace thee, in all
thy bookish pursuits, from correcting the press of thy beloved Froben,
to thy social meetings with Colet and More! You remember well,
Lisardo,--we saw, in yonder room, a _large paper_ copy of the fine
Leyden edition of this great man's works! You opened it; and were
struck with the variety--the solidity, as well as gaiety, of his
productions.

[Footnote 300: It were much to be wished that Mr. Roscoe,
who has so successfully turned his attention to the history
of _Italian Literature_, of the period of Erasmus, would
devote himself to the investigation of the philological
history of the German schools, and more especially to the
literary life of the great man of whom Lysander is above
speaking. The biographical memoirs of Erasmus by Le Clerc,
anglicised and enlarged by the learned Jortin, and Dr.
Knight's life of the same, can never become popular. They
want method, style and interest. Le Clerc, however, has made
ample amends for the defectiveness of his biographical
composition, by the noble edition of Erasmus's works which
he put forth at Leyden, in the year 1703-6, in eleven
volumes folio: of which volumes the reader will find an
excellent analysis or review in the _Act. Erudit._, A.D.
1704, &c. Le Clerc, _Bibl. Choisie_, vol. i., 380; Du Pin's
_Bibl. Eccles._, vol. xiv., and _Biblioth. Fabric_, pt. i.,
359; from which latter we learn that, in the public library,
at Deventer, there is a copy of Erasmus's works, in which
those passages, where the author speaks freely of the laxity
of the monkish character, have been defaced, "charta
fenestrata." A somewhat more compressed analysis of the
contents of these volumes appeared in the _Sylloge
Opusculorum Hist.-Crit., Literariorum, J.A. Fabricii, Hamb._
1738, 4to., p. 363, 378--preceded, however, by a pleasing,
yet brief account of the leading features of Erasmus's
literary life. Tn one of his letters to Colet, Erasmus
describes himself as "a very poor fellow in point of
fortune, and wholly exempt from ambition." A little before
his death he sold his library to one John a Lasco, a
Polonese, for only 2