While the influence of Erasmus on his contemporaries has been studied in various ways, it has been little noticed that even at the height of his fame Erasmus could himself be influenced by those who looked to him for inspiration. He probably reached the summit of his prestige as the prince of European letters between 1514 and 1516, when many of his important works were printed for the first time or reissued: Enchiridion Militis Christiani, which P. S. Allen says first attracted wide notice in the edition of 1514; Moriae Encomium (1514 and 1515); Adagiorum Chiliades (1515); the Greek New Testament (1516) and the Epistulae of St. Jerome (1516). Except for the first, all these works were printed by the firm of Johann Froben in Basel. Erasmus came to Basel in the late summer of 1514 to publish his Adagia and, after a brief trip to England in the spring of 1515, returned to publish his New Testament. The men who gathered around him at Froben's press seem to have had more than a little to do with what went into his books.

If, in a sense, all artists comment on their times, only a few do so deliberately. Pieter Bruegel the Elder is the first great example of the latter type, the artist as social observer and critic. His detailed scenes of everyday life, his illustrations of proverbs and moral lessons in contemporary settings are all well known. Recently, however, art historians have become increasingly aware of less obvious social and political overtones in Bruegel's work. Paintings from the last ten years of his life, ranging from the tiny Chained Monkeys to vast scenes like The Suicide of Saul, The Conversion of Saint Paul, and The Massacre of the Innocents, have all been interpreted as veiled but pointed commentaries on conditions and events in the Netherlands during the mid-sixteenth century. The facts of history, it appears, may be highly pertinent to Bruegel's art.

Thérèse Goyet dit, à propos du mot humanisme: ‘Littré ne reçoit le substantif que dans son supplément de 1877,’ et lui donne pour deuxième acception: ‘Théorie philosophique qui rattache les développements historiques de l'humanité à elle-même.’ En note, Thérèse Goyet exphque cette acception en écrivant: ‘Référence de Littré à la Revue Critique, 5 septembre 1874, page 156. “Rattache” et “historiques“ sont tout à fait vagues. Malheureusement, nous n'avons pu retrouver le texte: Il semble que la référence de Littré soit erronée.'

Or, je consulte le Supplément du Dictionnaire de Littré (Paris, 1883) et la Revue Critique d'Histoire et de Littérature, No 36—5 septembre—1874 (huitième année), p. 156, et je lis: ‘Il montre ensuite l'unité des Frères moraves naissant du hussitisme, le désir d'une réforme de l'Eglise s'emparant d'un grand nombre de personnalités marquantes et l'humanisme venant s'offrir à elles comme l'instrument d'une science plus sérieuse et d'une culture plus générale.'