rasmus wrote this, lets him out
on the severity of the argument. He was a joker. And while women did not
absorb much of his time, we find that on his travels he often turned
aside to visit with intellectual women--no other kind interested him, at
all.

* * * * *

To belong to a religious order is to be owned by it. You trade freedom
for protection. The soul of Erasmus revolted at life in a monastery. He
hated the typical monks--their food, their ways of life, their
sophistry, their stupidity. To turn glutton and welcome folly as a
relief from religion, he said, was the most natural thing in the world,
when men had once started in to lead an unnatural life. Good food,
daintily served, only goes with a co-ed mental regimen. Men eat with
their hands, out of a pot, unless women are present to enforce the
decencies. Women alone are a little more to be pitied than men alone, if
't were possible.

Through emulation does the race grow. Sex puts men and women on their
good behavior.

Man's desire for power has caused him to enslave himself. Writes
Erasmus, "In a monastery, no one is on his good behavior, except when
there are visitors, but I am told that this is so in families."

The greasy, coarse cooking brought on a nice case of dyspepsia for poor
Erasmus--a complaint from which he was never free as long as he lived.
His system was too fine for any monastic general trough, but he found a
compensation in having his say at odd times and sundry. At one time we
hear of his printing on a card this legend, "If I owned hell and a
monastery, I would sell the monastery and reside in hell." Thereby did
Erasmus supply General Tecumseh Sherman the germ of a famous orphic.
Sherman was a professor in a college at Baton Rouge before the War, and
evidently had moused in the Latin classics to a purpose.

Connected with the monastery where Erasmus lived was a printing-outfit.
Our versatile young monk learned the case, worked the ink-balls,
manipulated the lever, and evidently dispelled, in degree, the monotony
of the place by his ready pen and eloquent tongue. When he wrote, he
wrote for his ear. All was tested by reading the matter aloud. At that
time great authors were not so wise or so clever as printers, and it
fell to the lot of Erasmus to improve upon the text of much of the copy
that was presented.

Erasmus learned to write by writing; and among modern prose-writers he
is the very first who had a