That indeed is Beatus’ great characteristic throughout his life.  He was well off, for his father ’by the blessing of God on his ingenious endeavour had arisen to an ample estate’; and thus the son was not obliged to seek reward.  He gave himself, therefore, unstintingly to any work that needed doing for his friends, editing, correcting, supervising; and usually suppressing the part he had taken in it.  His own achievements are nevertheless considerable.  The bibliographers have discovered sixty-eight books in which he had a capital share; and though a large number of these appear to be mere reprints of books printed in France or Italy—­the law of copyright in those days was, as might be expected, uncertain—­, there is a residue in which he really did original work:  some notes on the history and geography of Germany which he composed, and editions of Pliny’s Natural History, Tacitus, Tertullian and Velleius Paterculus—­the latter having an almost romantic interest from the fortunes of the manuscript on which it is based.  A measure of the confidence which Erasmus subsequently reposed in both his judgement and his good faith is that in 1519 and 1521, when he had decided to publish some more of his letters, he just sent to Beatus bundles of the rough drafts he had preserved, and told him to select and edit them at his discretion.

A sketch of Beatus, written at his death by John Sturm of Strasburg, the friend of Ascham, gives a picture of the life he led at Schlettstadt during his last twenty years:  the plain, simple living in the great house inherited from his father, without luxury or display, attended upon by an old maidservant and a young servant-pupil, given to friends but not allowing hospitality to infringe upon his work, lapped in such quiet as to seem almost solitude; the daily round being dinner at ten, in the afternoon a walk in his gardens outside the city walls, and supper at six.  Gentle and accommodating, modest and diffident in spite of his learning, reluctant to talk of himself, and slow to take offence—­it is no wonder that he held the affections of his friends.  Well might Erasmus liken him to the blessed man of the first Psalm, ‘who shall be as a tree planted by the waterside.’

We have seen Beatus’ enthusiasm for queenly Basle.  Of his native town he was not so proud; though it has good Romanesque work in St. Fides’ church and rich Gothic in the minster, and though Wimpfeling had just built a beautiful Renaissance house with Italian designs round its bay window and medallions of Roman Emperors on the pilasters.  The school, too, was famous throughout Germany; and Lazarus Schurer had started a creditable printing-press.  Yet to Beatus the minster is only ’rather good, but modern’, the Dominicans’ house ‘mediocre’, the nuns’ buildings ‘unhealthy’, the people ’simple and resourceless, as you would expect with vine-growers, and too fond of drinking’.  ’There is nothing remarkable here’, he says, ’but the fortifications; indeed we are a stronghold rather than a city.  The walls are circular, built of elegant brick and with towers of some pretensions.’  What pleased him as much as anything was that the ramparts were covered in for almost the whole of their length, and thus afforded protection to the night-guards against what he calls ‘celestial injuries’.