their protection, to be worth anything, might entail upon them the necessity of an energetic struggle and of self-compromise.  “Trust not in princes nor their children,” said Lord Strafford, after the Psalmist [Nolite confidere principibus et filiis eorum, quia non est sales in illis, Ps. cxlvi.], when, in the seventeenth century, he found that Charles I. was abandoning him to the English Parliament and the executioner.  Louis de Berquin might have felt similar distrust as to Francis I., but his nature was confident and hopeful; when he knew of the king’s letter to the Parliament, he considered himself safe, and he testified as much to Erasmus in a long letter, in which he told him the story of his trial, and alluded to “the fresh outbreak of anger on the part of those hornets who accuse me of heresy,” said he, “simply because I have translated into the vulgar tongue some of your little works, wherein they pretend that they have discovered the most monstrous pieces of impiety.”  He transmitted to Erasmus a list of the paragraphs which the pope’s delegates had condemned, pressing him to reply, “as you well know how.  The king esteems you much, and will esteem you still more when you have heaped confusion on this brood of benighted theologians whose ineptitude is no excuse for their violence.”  By a strange coincidence, Berquin’s most determined foe, Noel Beda, provost of the Sorbonne, sent at the same time to Erasmus a copy of more than two hundred propositions which had been extracted from his works, and against which he, Beda, also came forward as accuser.  Erasmus was a prudent man, and did not seek strife; but when he was personally and offensively attacked by enemies against whom he was conscious of his strength, he exhibited it proudly and ably; and he replied to Beda by denouncing him, on the 6th of June, to the Parliament of Paris itself, as an impudent and ignorant calumniator.  His letter, read at the session of Parliament on the 5th of July, 1526, was there listened to with profound deference, and produced a sensation which did not remain without effect; in vain did Beda persist in accusing Erasmus of heresy and in maintaining that he was of the brotherhood of Luther; Parliament considered him in the wrong, provisionally prohibited the booksellers from vending his libels against Erasmus, and required previous authorization to be obtained for all books destined for the press by the rectors of the Sorbonne.

The success of Erasmus was also a success for Berquin; but he was still in prison, ill and maltreated.  The king wrote on the 11th of July to Parliament to demand that he should enjoy at least all the liberties that the prison would admit of, that he should no longer be detained in an unhealthy cell, and that he should be placed in that building of the Conciergerie where the court-yard was.  “That,” was the answer, “would be a bad precedent; they never put in the court-yard convicts who had incurred the penalty of death.”  An offer was made