Did he {61} like anything?
If so, he only admitted--except when he was addressing his patrons--"that he was not altogether averse to it." But all at once from these feather-light touches, like those of a Henry James, comes the sudden thrust that made his stylus a dagger.

Some of his epigrams on the Reformation have been quoted in practically every history of the subject since, and will be quoted as often again.
[Sidenote: His wit] But it was not a few perfect phrases that made him the power that he was, but an habitual wit that never failed to strip any situation of its vulgar pretense.

When a canon of Strassburg Cathedral was showing him over the chapter house and was boasting of the rule that no one should be admitted to a prebend who had not sixteen quarterings on his coat of arms, the humanist dropped his eyes and remarked demurely, with but the flicker of a smile, that he was indeed honored to be in a religious company so noble that even Jesus could not have come up to its requirements.

The man was dumfounded, he almost suspected something personal; but he never forgot the salutary lesson so delicately conveyed.
Erasmus was a man of peace; he feared "the tumult" which, if we trust a letter dated September 9, 1517--though he sometimes retouched his letters on publishing them--he foresaw.

"In this part of the world," he wrote, "I am afraid that a great revolution is impending." It was already knocking at the door! {62} CHAPTER II GERMANY SECTION 1.