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'.
One reason that we know Beatus so well is that his library has survived almost intact, as well as a great number of letters which he received. At his death he left his books to the town of Schlettstadt; and there they still are, forming the major and by far the most important part of the town library. It is a wonderful collection of about a thousand volumes, some of them extremely rare; many bought by him in his Paris days, some presents from friends sent or brought from far with dedicatory inscriptions. Hardly a book has not his name and the date when he acquired it, or other marks of his use. But they have not yet come to their full usefulness, for there is no adequate catalogue of them. In many cases their direct value has passed away. No one wishes to read the classics or the Fathers in the texts current in the sixteenth century; yet behind printed books lie manuscripts, and from examination of manuscripts on which printed texts are based, we can gather many useful indications to throw light on the tradition of the classics, the gradual steps by which the past has come down to us. Besides such texts there are multitudes of original compositions of Beatus' own period, books of great value for the history of scholarship; many of them requiring to be dated with more precision than is attainable on the surface. It will be a signal service to learning when a trained bibliographer takes Beatus Rhenanus' books in hand and gives us a scientific catalogue.