MSS.

mss., one of which he sent straight to press, correcting them in places by collations of others which had been sent to him by colet in england. in four reprints, 1519, 1522, 1527, 1535, erasmus gradually weeded out many of the typographical errors of his first edition, but the text remained essentially such as he had first printed it. the greek text indeed was only a part of his scheme. an important feature of the volume was the new latin version, the original being placed alongside as a guarantee of the translator's good faith. this translation, with the justificatory notes which accompanied it, though not itself a work of critical scholarship, became the starting-point of modern exegetical science. erasmus did nothing to solve the problem, but to him belongs the honour of having first propounded it. besides translating and editing the new testament, erasmus paraphrased the whole, except the apocalypse, between 1517 and 1524. the paraphrases were received with great applause, even by those who had little appreciation for erasmus. in england a translation of them made in 1548 was ordered to be placed in all parish churches beside the bible. his correspondence is perhaps the part of his works which has the most permanent value; it comprises about 3000 letters, which form an important source for the history of that period. for the same purpose his _colloquia_ may be consulted. they are a series of dialogues, written first for pupils in the early paris days as formulae of polite address, but afterwards expanded into lively conversations, in which many of the topics of the day are discussed. later in the century they were read in schools, and some of shakespeare's lines are direct reminiscences of erasmus. his complete works have been printed twice; by the froben firm under the direction of his literary executors (9 vols., basel, 1540); and by leclerc at leiden (11 vols., 1703-1706). for his life the chief contemporary sources are a _compendium vitae_ written by himself in 1524, and a sketch prefixed by beatus rhenanus to the basel edition of 1540. of his writings he gives an account in his _catalogus lucubrationum_, composed first in january 1523 and enlarged in september 1524; and also in a letter to hector boece of aberdeen, written in 1530. an elaborate bibliography, entitled _bibliotheca erasmiana_, was undertaken by the officials of the ghent university library; it is divided into three sections, for erasmus's writings, the books he edited, and the literature about him. _listes sommaires_ were issued in 1893; and since 1897 the completed volumes have been appearing at intervals. there is an excellent sketch of erasmus's life down to 1519 in f. seebohm's _oxford reformers_ (3rd ed., 1887); and of the many biographies those by s. knight (1726), j. jortin (2 vols., 1758-1760) and r.b. drummond (2 vols., 1873) may be mentioned. there are also two volumes (1901-1904) of translations by f.m. nichols from erasmus's letters down to 1517, with an ample commentary which amounts almost to a biography; and an edition of the letters, in latin, was begun by the oxford university press in 1906 (vol. ii., 1910). (m. p.; p. s. a.)