Erasmus: Life of a humanist

This book presents the history of Erasmus, an European humanist; and his essay against war.
"With Erasmus a new period opens. Two things broadly distinguish him, as a scholar, from the men before and after him. First, he was not only a refined humanist, writing for the fastidious few, and prizing no judgment but theirs; he took the most profitable authors of antiquity,-profitable in a moral as well as a literary sense,-chose out the best things in them,-and sought to make these things wide...