Would that men were content to let Christ rule by the laws of the gospel and that they would no longer seek to strengthen their obscurant tyranny by human decrees! [Sidenote: Colloquies] In the _Familiar Colloquies_, first published in 1518 and often enlarged in subsequent editions, Erasmus brought out his religious ideas most sharply.

Enormous as were the sales and influence of his other chief writings, they were probably less than those of this work, intended primarily as a text-book of Latin style.

The first conversations are, indeed, nothing more than school-boy exercises, but the later ones are short stories penned with consummate art.

Erasmus is almost the only man who, since the fall of Rome, has succeeded in writing a really exquisite Latin.

But his supreme gift was his dry wit, the subtle faculty of exposing an object, apparently by a simple matter-of-fact narrative, to the keenest ridicule.