[Transcriber's note]

[Table of Contents]

[List of Illustrations]

[Index]

HEROES OF THE REFORMATION.

G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS
NEW YORK AND LONDON

Heroes of the Reformation

EDITED BY

Samuel Macauley Jackson

PROFESSOR OF CHURCH HISTORY, NEW YORK
UNIVERSITY

Διαιρέσεις χαρισμάτων, τὸ δὲ αὐτὸ πνεῦμα.

DIVERSITIES OF GIFTS, BUT THE SAME SPIRIT.

DESIDERIUS ERASMUS

[Pg i]

DESIDERIUS ERASMUS
OF ROTTERDAM

BY

EPHRAIM EMERTON, Ph.D.

WINN PROFESSOR OF ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY IN HARVARD
UNIVERSITY

O Erasme Roterodame, wo wiltu bleiben? Sieh, was vermag die ungerecht tyranney der weltlichen gewahlt, der macht der finsternuss? Hör, du ritter Christi, reith hervor neben den herrn Christum, beschüz die wahrheit, erlang der martärer cron.

A. Dürer's Diary, 1521.

G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS
NEW YORK AND LONDON
The Knickerbocker Press
1899

[Pg ii]

Copyright, 1899
BY
G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS
Entered at Stationers' Hall, London

The Knickerbocker Press, New York

PREFACE

A complete and satisfactory life of Erasmus of Rotterdam still remains to be written. Its author will have to be a thorough student of the classic literatures, a theologian familiar with every form of Christian speculation, a historian, to whom the complicated movement of the Reformation is altogether intelligible, an educator, a moralist, and a man of humour. Only to such a person—if such there ever were—could the writing of this life be a wholly congenial task. The subject has been approached by different writers from all the points of view indicated, but no biography has yet shown the whole range or value of Erasmus' varied activities.

The limitations of the present volume have fortunately been clearly defined by the title of the series in which it forms a part. Its function is to deal with Erasmus as a factor in the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century. With the very peculiar and often elusive personality of the man it has to do only in so far as it serves to suggest an explanation of his attitude towards the world-movement of his time. I say "suggest an explanation" rather than "explain," because, with all diligence, I cannot hope to have made clear all of the many problems involved in the inquiry. At every stage of the study of Erasmus one has to ask first what he believed himself to be doing, then what he wished others to believe he was doing, then what others did think he was doing, and finally what the man actually was doing. And all this has to be learned chiefly from his own words and from his reports of the words of others.

His life was full of strange incongruities, and any story of his life which should seek to cover these incongruities by any fictitious theory of consistency would but ill reflect the truth. And yet, with all its pettinesses and weaknesses, its contradictions and its comings-short of natural demands upon it, this life has, after all, an element of the heroic. If there be a heroism of persistent work and cheerful endurance, of steady exclusion of all distractions, of refusal to commit oneself to anything or anybody which might impede one's chosen line of duty, then we may gladly admit Erasmus into the choice company of the Heroes of the Reformation.

Such a distinction would vastly have amused him. He would have seized his pen and dashed off to some friend, who would spread the word, some such disclaimer as this: "Well, of all things in the world, now they are calling me a hero! If you never laughed before, laugh now to your heart's content. I a hero! a man afraid of my shadow,—a man of books, a hater of conflict, a man, who, if he were put to the test would, I fear, follow the example of Peter and deny his Lord. And, not content with this, they add 'of the Reformation.' I, who never, by word or deed, drunk or sober, gave so much as a hint of belonging to any of their accursed 'movements'! Well, no man can strive against the Fates."

I have chosen the chronological method because it serves best to illustrate the development of the man in his relation to his time. Such selections from Erasmus' writings have been chosen for detailed examination as bear most directly upon the main objects of the book. It has seemed wiser to make them long enough to show their true meaning rather than to use a greater number of mere scraps, which might in almost every case be contradicted by other scraps. So far as possible the merely controversial has been avoided. For example, I have barely alluded to the prolonged discussions with Archbishop Lee, the Frenchman Bedda, the Spaniard Stunica, and the Italian prince of Carpi. The detail of these controversies tends rather to confuse than to illuminate the point of chief interest to us. Yet no treatment of Erasmus could escape entirely the tone of controversy. He set that tone himself and the student of his writings inevitably falls into it.

The translations have been kept as close to the originals as was consistent with a freedom of style somewhat corresponding to Erasmus' own. It would be hopeless to attempt, by any paraphrasing whatever, to improve upon the freshness and vivacity of the author.

My thanks are due to many friends for kind assistance and suggestion, but especially to my colleague, Professor Albert A. Howard of the Latin department of Harvard University, to whose careful revision the accuracy of the translations is chiefly due.

References to the Leyden edition of Erasmus' works in 1703-1706 are given simply by volume, page (column), and division of the column, as, e. g., iii.¹, 157-B.

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

[Pg xii]

INTRODUCTION

The student of Erasmus is at first overwhelmed by the abundance of the material before him. A man who has left to posterity enough to fill eleven folio volumes would seem to have made a biographer unnecessary. Especially when two of these volumes are filled with personal letters, more than eighteen hundred in number, and addressed to some five hundred correspondents, it might well seem that the best biography would be a faithful transcript of what the man himself has given us. And, in fact, almost all that we know about Erasmus comes through himself. The singular thing is that with this great mass of material we know so little that is definite about him.

He lived in one of the most eventful periods of the world's history, and was in some kind of personal relation with its leading actors; and yet his life, from beginning to end, has not one event more important or stirring than a journey in winter, an attack of illness, a quarrel with some fellow scholar, or a change of residence. Our whole knowledge of his early life up to the period of production is derived from a very brief record made by himself many years afterward and made obviously with both a literary and a practical purpose.

His letters were largely collected and published by himself long after they were written, and were, so he himself tells us, freely altered for publication. Their chronology is hopelessly confused. Erasmus says that he supplied many of them with the day and year when he came to edit them. He was himself at all times curiously indifferent to the merely historical. It was always subordinate in his mind to the broadly human and philosophical. The letters must therefore be read with constant reference to their immediate purpose, and few of them are without purpose, though it would require a bold man indeed to be always sure just what it is. Luther's judgment upon them was unjustly severe: "In the epistles of Erasmus you find nothing of any account, except praise for his friends, scolding and abuse for his enemies, and that's all there is to it." The principles which governed Erasmus as editor of his own correspondence are indicated in a letter[1] of 1520 to Beatus Rhenanus.

He represents himself as driven to edit them in order to check the publication of unauthorised editions, of which several had certainly appeared before 1519. He determined to make at least a selection and judiciously to modify the contents. "With this purpose I revised the collection. Some things I explained, which certain persons had interpreted unfavourably. Some, which I found had offended the oversensitive and irritable tempers of certain persons, I struck out. Some things I softened." But, after all, he says, as time went on, he repented him of his plan and urged Froben, to whom he had sent the "copy," to suppress it entirely or put it off to a more fitting time. But the work was so far along that Froben declared he would not throw away all that expense, and Erasmus just had to humour him. "I had to give way to him and incur myself perhaps the risk of my reputation in order to save him the risk of his money."[2]

Erasmus shared with most scholars of the Renaissance the cacoethes scribendi. He says of himself that his words were rather poured out than written. When he took his pen in hand it became an independent force, against which he had to contend lest it run away with him altogether, and it is one of his claims to greatness as a writer that on the whole he kept the mastery over it. This essentially literary quality must be constantly borne in mind by the historian and he must always be striving to fix the line where history ends and literature begins.

Again,—and here also Erasmus was eminently a Renaissance man,—he felt himself to be the centre of the world. In a sense that is, of course, true of every thinking man; but in Erasmus this newly awakened individual consciousness took on a form of acute personal sensitiveness which affected his relation to all persons and all things about him. Especially it reacted upon his writing. He could not be objective upon any question into which his personality entered ever so slightly. Whatever touched him as a man, as a scholar, a theologian, a churchman, or a citizen, began at once to lose its true perspective. He saw it only in its relation to himself, or at best to the cause of pure learning, which he always felt to be embodied in himself.

No writer upon Erasmus has failed to notice these qualities. The singular thing has been that, recognising them, the biographers have not tried in any consistent fashion to measure them as affecting the value of our sources of knowledge. It has generally sufficed to refer to them and then to treat the sources as pure historical information. Plainly the solution is not an easy one. If we should reject, for example, the letter to Grunnius[3] or the Colloquy on The Eating of Fish[4] as sources for Erasmus' early life, we should have very little left. If we should accept them as history we should be mingling fact and fancy in altogether uncertain proportions. The only safe method is, therefore, to try in each case to weigh the value of the text before us with fullest reference to all the circumstances.

This rule applies as well to the treatises as to the letters, whenever the personal element enters into the account. Where no such issue can be raised, as, for example, in the purely philological essays or in the treatises against war, or in abstract moral or didactic writing, we are often forced to admire the vigour and decision of Erasmus' utterance. But if his personal judgment was assailed, as it frequently was, then even on a merely grammatical question his sensitive temper was readily roused to a kind of defence which we find very difficult to accept as a calm statement of fact.

Another source of confusion is Erasmus' amazing command of classic literature and his cleverness in utilising, not merely the forms, but at times the ideas and even the phrases of ancient authors. How much of what he says, for example, in his descriptions of persons, whether favourably or unfavourably, is really his own and how much borrowed is often quite impossible to discover. This borrowing or adapting is so much a habit that he obviously borrows from himself, using under similar circumstances what seem to have become almost formulas of his thought. He must be literary; he might be accurate.

Of contemporary biographical attempts we have almost nothing. Erasmus' younger friend, Beatus Rhenanus of Schlettstadt in Alsatia, one of the Basel circle of scholars, has left us two fragments, one a dedication to the Emperor Charles V. of the 1540 edition of Erasmus' works, and the other from the dedication to an edition of Origen in 1536 with Erasmus' revision. These two brief sketches fill but six printed folio pages. They are disfigured by elaborate panegyric, not only of Erasmus, but of the emperor as well, are obviously drawn from Erasmus' own account of himself, and contribute little original material to our knowledge.

In regard to his writings, Erasmus on two occasions made attempts to summarise his work, once in 1524 at the request of John Botzheim, a canon of the church at Constance, and again, during his residence at Freiburg, in reply to an inquiry from Hector Boëthius of the University of Aberdeen. The latter is a mere table of contents for a possible complete edition of his works, but the former includes a great deal of description of the circumstances under which many of the works were written. These descriptions are at times so trivial that they can hardly command our respect, and yet it would of course be impossible to deny that a work of great importance may have had a trivial suggestion. This longer catalogue gives us also a good many sidelights upon Erasmus' personality and movements. The general arrangement and division into volumes suggested by Erasmus himself were followed in the first Basel edition of 1540, and have been preserved in the Leyden edition of Leclerc in 1703-1706 which we have used.

That the following pages will give a clear and consistent impression of Erasmus' motive at each stage of his career is more than we can hope for. The best we can offer is an honest appreciation of his great service to the cause of reform, often in ways he little expected or desired, often very indirectly, and always without relation to any definite scheme of action. We may, however, fairly hope that as each occasion arises, we have so plainly set the possibilities before the reader that he may form an intelligent judgment as to the probability.

The most serious problem at every step is what weight to give to Erasmus' statements about himself. The only reasonable test is to be found in what he actually did. If, for example, he professes undying love for the city of Rome and an uncontrollable desire to end his days there; at the same time protests that everyone at Rome is longing to have him there, and yet takes no steps to go, we are forced to inquire what were the reasons which kept him away, and may have to conclude that all this was a bit of comedy arranged for some effect which we, as plain historians, should be glad to understand.

In applying these tests to Erasmus' declarations about the Reformation we find the largest scope for the critical method. All that is mysterious in his personality up to that time becomes doubly so when he finds himself—he would have us believe quite against his will—thrust forward into prominence as a rebel against the existing order. Several courses of action were open to him: First, and most obvious, to keep silent; second, to join with the party of reform, try to hold it to the essential things, and supply it with the weapons of learning which none could prepare so well as he; third, to denounce the reform, seek his safety in close alliance with Rome, and then try to moderate, as far as he could, the extremes of Roman abuse. No one of these methods commended itself wholly to his judgment or to his nature. He could not be silent; he would not lend himself to what he called "sedition"; and he neither could, nor did he quite dare, trust himself in the hands of the Church he professed to serve, lest he find his liberty of action restricted beyond endurance.

The world into which Erasmus was born was a world of violent contrasts. The papal system, having come victorious out of the struggle with the conciliar movement of the fifteenth century, seemed to control without resistance every current of ecclesiastical life and thought. Yet the deep and steady flow of sincere and simple faith best represented by the mystical writers, individual and associated, was gaining in force and was making Europe ready for a revolt they never even thought of. The spirit of modern science, which is nothing more than a desire to see things in their true relations, was making itself felt in invention and discovery and in the revelation of Man to himself as a being worth investigating. Yet over against this spirit of light and liberty hovers the dark shadow of the Inquisition and its kindred manifestations of an exclusive claim to the knowledge and control of the Truth. Vast political powers were contending for the possession of long-disputed territories, while within their borders great social and industrial discontents were gathering to a demonstration whenever the strain of these dynastic struggles should become unbearable.

There were men in this vast conflict of ideas to whom it was given to lead others along some visible and definable road to some determinable end: Thomas à Kempis along the way of faith to the haven of religious peace; Luther and Calvin along the way of doctrinal clearness through ecclesiastical revolution to deliberate reconstruction; Descartes through a single, all-inclusive philosophical proposition to ultimate certainty of thought; the great artists through "painting the thing as they saw it" to a new basis of æsthetic judgment. The special function of Erasmus in the Great Readjustment was, as he conceived it, to bring men back to the standards of a true Christianity by constant reference to the principles of ancient learning, and by an appeal to the tribunal of common sense. His activity took many forms; but he was always, whether through classical treatise or encyclopædic collection or satirical dialogue or direct moral appeal—always and everywhere, the preacher of righteousness. His successes were invariably along this line. His failures were caused by his incapacity to perceive at what moment the mere appeal to the moral sense was no longer adequate. His services to the Reformation were warmly recognised even by so violent an opponent as Hutten; his personal limitations were in danger of making those services of no avail, and there was the point where he and those with whom he ought to have worked parted company.

Our work divides itself naturally into two parts: First, the development of Erasmus up to the outbreak of the Lutheran Reformation in 1517, and second, his relation to the leading persons and ideas of the next twenty years. In treating the former period we shall examine the traditional story of Erasmus' early education, and shall illustrate by selections showing as fairly as may be what proved to be the dominant traits of his mind and character. In the second part we shall endeavour to show how the traits thus formed determined his attitude towards the unexpected demands of a new time.

[Pg xxii]

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

It would be idle to attempt here an Erasmian bibliography, since the elaborate undertaking of the University Library at Ghent in 1893[5] has placed the material available up to that date in a form accessible to every reader. The same editors are now engaged upon a still more stupendous enterprise, a bibliography,[6] in 16º form, giving complete titles of all known editions of every work. Begun in 1897, it thus far includes only the editions of the Adagia. I give here, therefore, only the sources likely to interest the general reader and especially such as I have consulted in the preparation of this volume.

I have used constantly the Leyden edition of Erasmus' works[7] based upon the Basel edition of 1540. The arrangement is roughly according to the nature of the material. The editorial work is meagre and careless. The indexes are elaborately and exasperatingly useless. In the case of the letters, though the editor is perfectly conscious of false arrangement and dating, he leaves them as he finds them, and the reader is compelled to discover the inaccuracies for himself. Professor Adalbert Horawitz of Vienna was preparing to write a Life of Erasmus when he was interrupted by death in 1888. His preliminary studies[8] have supplied much new material and given us many valuable critical suggestions. In 1876 Professor W. Vischer of Basel, acting on the suggestion of Horawitz, published a series of very interesting documents which he had discovered in the Basel University Library, and which throw much light upon several obscure points in the life of Erasmus.[9] An article by the late Dr. R. Fruin,[10] which came to my knowledge after the completion of the manuscript, quite confirms my view of the utter untrustworthiness of Erasmus' accounts of his early life. Jortin's Life of Erasmus, first published in 1758-60, 2d ed., in 3 vols., 1808, is little more than a translation of Leclerc's Vie d'Érasme[11] which was published as a kind of résumé and advertisement at once of the Leyden Opera. Jortin gives, however, in addition, a good many documents and a mass of more or less relevant remarks.

Of more recent biographies, that of R. B. Drummond[12] is, all things considered, the best; careful and serious, but showing the almost universal tendency to take Erasmus at his word, even while admitting his incapacity to tell the truth.

Durand de Laur[13] gives in his first volume a sketch of Erasmus' life with little critical sifting of evidence, and in the second an interesting examination of his achievements in the several lines of his activity.

Froude's Life and Letters[14] illustrates the author's familiar qualities,—his remarkable distinctness of view and his complete indifference to accuracy of detail.

Samuel Knight's Life,[15] 1726, is still readable. It deals chiefly with the relations of Erasmus to England, and gives a great deal of "curious information" about persons incidentally connected with him.

Other works likely to be of interest to the reader and student are:

Altmeyer, J. J., Les précurseurs de la Réforme aux Pays-bas. Brussels, 1886. Érasme et les hommes de son temps, vol. i., pp. 258-343.

Amiel, Émile, Un Libre-penseur du XVI siècle: Érasme. Paris, 1889.

Burigny, J. L. de, Vie d'Érasme. 2 vols. Paris, 1757.

Butler, Charles, Life of Erasmus. London, 1825.

Feugère, Gaston, Érasme,—Étude sur sa vie et ses ouvrages. Paris, 1874.

Hartfelder, Karl, D. Erasmus von Rotterdam und die Päpste seiner Zeit; in Raumer's Historisches Taschenbuch, 1891.

Hartfelder, Karl, Friedrich der Weise und D. Erasmus von Rotterdam; in Zeitschrift für vergleichende Literaturgeschichte, etc., new series, iv., 1891.

Janssen, Joh., Geschichte des Deutschen Volkes seit dem Ausgang des Mittelalters. Freiburg, 1879, and in repeated editions. On Erasmus in vol. ii.

Kämmel, H., Erasmus in Deventer; in Jahrbücher für classische Philologie, vol. cx.

Müller, Adolph, Leben des Erasmus. Hamburg, 1828.

Nolhac, Pierre de, Érasme en Italie; étude sur un épisode de la Renaissance avec douze lettres inédites d'Érasme. Paris, 1888.

Pennington, A. R., The Life of Erasmus. London, 1875.

Richter, Arthur, Erasmus-Studien. Dresden, 1891.

Seebohm, Frederic, The Oxford Reformers of 1498: Colet, Erasmus, More. London, 1867; 3d ed., 1887.

Staehelin, R., Erasmus' Stellung zur Reformation. Basel, 1873.

Stichart, F. O., Erasmus von Rotterdam, Seine Stellung zu der Kirche und zu den kirchlichen Bewegungen seiner Zeit. Leipzig, 1870.

Woltmann, A., Holbein und seine Zeit. Leipzig, 1866-68, 2 parts; 2d ed., 1874-76, 2 vols. English translation, Holbein and his Time. London, 1872.

DESIDERIUS ERASMUS

[Pg xxviii]

DESIDERIUS ERASMUS

CHAPTER I
SCHOOL AND MONASTERY
1467-1490

In a letter[16] written by Erasmus, in 1520, to Peter Manius occurs a passage so characteristic of the writer that one can hardly have a better introduction to the study of his life. Manius had urged him to declare frankly that he was not a Frenchman but a German, in order that Germany might not be defrauded of so great a glory. Erasmus replies:

"In the first place it seems to me to make little difference where a man is born, and I think it a vain sort of glorification when a city or a nation boasts of producing a man who has become great through his own exertions and not by the help of his native land. Far more properly may that country boast which has made him great than that which brought him forth. So far I speak as if there were anything in me in which my country might take pride. It is enough for me if she be not ashamed of me,—though indeed Aristotle does not wholly disapprove that kind of pride which may add a spur to the pursuit of a worthy aim.

"If there were any of this kind of pride in me I should wish that not France and Germany alone should claim me, but that each and every nation and city might go into the strife for Erasmus. It would be a useful error which should incite so many to worthy effort. Whether I am a Batavian or no is not even yet quite clear to me. I cannot deny that I am a Hollander, born in that region which, if we may trust the map-makers, lies rather towards France than towards Germany; although it is beyond a doubt that that whole region is on the borderland between the two."

Erasmus cared not where he was born and certainly was in no way identified with Rotterdam, his native place. He often speaks of "us" and "our people," referring to Low Germans generally, but he preferred to be called a citizen of the world, and his whole life is the illustration of this indifference. Though born a Dutchman, it has been doubted whether he could speak with readiness his native tongue, and it seems certain that no other modern language came as readily to his lips as did the speech of ancient Rome.[17] During a long life he was continually in motion, never resting more than a few years in any one place, always seeking more favourable conditions for the work he had in hand.

Holland, Belgium, England, France, Switzerland, were equally his homes, "ubi bene, ibi patria." If he had a preference of sentiment for any country it was possibly for England, but the demands of his work and the pressure of untoward circumstances carried him hither and yon, so that his visits to England seem rather like busy vacations in his arduous life. Patriotism, citizenship, loyalty to a place, seemed to him like so many limitations upon that dominant individuality which was the key-note of his character.

As he was indifferent to the place, so was he also to the time of his birth. It is even probable that he did not know precisely when he was born. At all events he nowhere tells us, excepting that the day was the 27-28th of October. As to the year we are left to later conjecture, and 1467, the date placed by the citizens of Rotterdam upon their monument to his memory, is as likely to be correct as any other.[18]

In regard to his family and the circumstances of his birth, Erasmus was also reticent to the point of obscurity. That he was born out of wedlock is clear. His enemies made what little they could out of the fact, and he never took the trouble to deny it. We may safely conclude that he cared as little to what family he belonged as to what land he owed his affection. Our actual knowledge on the subject is limited to the pathetic little opening paragraph of the very brief Compendium Vitæ, which he sent, under the impression of approaching death, to his intimate friend, Conrad Goclenius, Latin professor at the University of Louvain. "Nothing," he says in the letter accompanying it, "was ever more unfortunate than my birth, but perchance there will be those who will add fictions to the facts." "My father Gerard," he writes, "had secretly an affair with Margaret, daughter of a physician of Zevenberge, in the hope of marriage, and some say that they had plighted their troth (intercessisse verba)."

The marriage was delayed by the desire of Gerard's parents that one of their family of ten sons should be devoted to the Church and by the jealousy of the brothers lest their property be diminished. Meanwhile Gerard, "as desperate men are wont to do," took himself out of the way and wandered to Rome. Our Erasmus was born after his departure. The relatives, learning Gerard's whereabouts, sent him word that Margaret was dead, and the poor fellow, who had been earning his living as a copyist and decorator of manuscripts, sought refuge in ordination as a priest. On his return to Holland he discovered the fraud, but lived the short remnant of his days faithful to his priestly vows.

One or two obscure references in later writings give some reason to think that Erasmus had an older brother, who figures also in the letter to Grunnius mentioned in the Introduction. This brother can interest us only as affecting the question of the relation between the father and mother of Erasmus. His appearance in the letter to Grunnius reminds one so strongly of the characters introduced by Erasmus in his Colloquies to serve as foils for the principal speakers, that one can hardly help suspecting a similar device here. At all events the brother is too shadowy a personage to warrant us in drawing from his previous existence any instructive conclusion as to the origin of Erasmus.

In spite of so unfavourable a start in life, the early years of the lad seem to have been as well sheltered and cared for as could be desired. The little Gerard, as tradition would have him called during his childhood, was early sent to school in Gouda (Tergouw), his father's native place, to an uncle, Peter Winckel by name, and served for some time before he was nine years old as choir-boy at the Cathedral of Utrecht.[19]

He says of himself at this tender age, that he "made but little progress in those unattractive studies for which he was not made by Nature," but we are hardly warranted in drawing from this phrase the conclusion that he was ever a backward scholar.

At nine he was sent to the famous school at Deventer. His mother accompanied him and cared for him as before. Of the Deventer school Erasmus says that it was "as yet a barbarous place," by which he means that it had not yet been reformed in the direction of the New Learning. The boys had to learn their "pater meus,"[20] (?) to conjugate their verbs, and to master their Latin grammar in the text-books of Everard and John Garland. It was a dreary method and Erasmus' recollection doubtless made it seem worse than it really was. The error of it to his maturer mind was that it was rather practical than scientific, especially that it did not introduce the pupil from the outset to the models of Latin style, which the great classic authors alone could furnish. He looked back upon these, as indeed upon all his years of pupilage, as to a time of struggle and hardship. Yet the fact is that he was making rapid progress, and at the close of his four years at Deventer he found himself the equal in learning of many older lads.

The head-master of Deventer at the time was a German, Alexander Hegius, from whom and from John Sintheim, one of the teachers, Erasmus says the school was beginning to get a glimmer of the great light, which, spreading from Italy, was enlightening the world. Erasmus' younger friend and biographer, Beatus Rhenanus, speaks of this Hegius as a man of very moderate learning, who knew no Greek at all, but says that he was open to the merits of the learning he did not share and gladly accepted the instruction of the younger German scholar, Rudolf Agricola, who had just returned from Italy fresh with the eager enthusiasm of that land of all promise. Erasmus fancied that the most he got out of his Deventer days was a "certain odor of better learning" which came to him from his older mates, who enjoyed the direct teaching of Sintheim, and from the occasional hearing of Hegius, who on feast days lectured to the whole school. There can be no doubt, however, that he had got on famously in Latin and made at least a beginning in Greek.[21] Beatus tells a very pretty story of Sintheim,—that having heard Erasmus recite, he kissed him and said, "Go on, Erasmus, you will some day reach the very summit of learning."

After four years at Deventer an outbreak of the plague carried off the faithful mother and within a few weeks the father also, both just over forty years of age. Gerard, so Erasmus says, left a modest fortune, sufficient, if it had been properly husbanded, to provide for his own education at a university. The guardians, however, to whom he had intrusted his little property, the uncle Peter Winckel especially, were determined not to give the boy an academic training, but instead to turn him into the monastic life. Beatus speaks of Deventer as "a most prolific nursery of monks of every kind," and Erasmus employs this phrase, with every shade of anger and contempt, for the next institution in which his lot was to be cast.

This was a house of the so-called "Brethren of the Common Life" at 's Hertogenbosch (Bois-le-Duc). This widespread organisation had for more than a century played a large part in the religious life of the Low Countries. Founded by one Gerard Groot of Deventer, about 1380, it had come into existence as above all else a protest against the dominant monasticism of the Middle Ages. It was not an "order" in the stricter sense; the brethren were not bound by irrevocable vows; they were not regularly chartered by the authority of the Church. It was a free association of men who simply came to live together, giving up their private property, in order that they might the more effectively, as they believed, live the life of the Spirit.

Their chief occupation was the copying of sacred writings, but they professed to support themselves by manual labour. Without calling into question any of the teachings of the Church, their greater lights, Gerard himself, Thomas à Kempis, John Wessel, had given to them a deeper spiritual meaning. They had sought to emphasise rather the inner life of the individual than the outward, visible institutions of the Church. Naturally they had from the first been suspected by all those elements of the Church organisation which saw their future thus threatened; the regular orders, the Inquisition, the secularised priesthood, had each in its turn sought to check this growing protest against their peculiar interests. On the other hand, the communities in which the brethren had established themselves had come to value them as examples of piety and types of a virtue which did not tend to separate men too widely from the life of the world.

Now all this would seem to point precisely in the direction towards which all the thought of Erasmus naturally turned. Of the two early instructors who chiefly impressed him, Hegius and Sintheim, the latter was certainly of the Brethren. The school of Deventer, while probably not directly under their control, was profoundly influenced by them. Yet we find in his writings repeated reflections upon their houses as training-schools for the monasteries and upon themselves as enemies of sound learning and practical virtue.

At 's Hertogenbosch he spent—or, as he himself says, wasted—about three years. Yet he admits that at the end of that time he had made good progress, had acquired a ready style, and in some good authors was "satis paratus." We may be quite sure that he would not have exaggerated any attainments he might have made under such circumstances. His residence at 's Hertogenbosch was cut short by an illness, a quartan fever, as he describes it, to which he seems to have been subject. He was thrown back upon his guardians and, if we may believe his own later testimony, he found the whole world in a conspiracy to force him into the monastic life. The uncle Peter, whom he describes as a man of good outward reputation, but selfish, ignorant, and bigoted, was especially determined on this point. Erasmus makes what he can out of the ruin of his little fortune as a motive for getting rid of him, but rather spoils the force of his argument by representing Peter as upon principle devoted to getting his pupils into monasteries. "He used to brag about how many youths he had captured every year for Francis or Dominic or Benedict or Augustine or Bridget."

That the effort of the guardians was to persuade Erasmus to become a member of the Brethren of the Common Life is made probable by his use of the term "Fratres Collationarii." This was one of the popular names for the Brethren, derived from their peculiar practice of giving moral instruction by means of conferences (collationes). Erasmus includes them all in his sweeping denunciations of all schools and monasteries as "man-stealers." "Formerly," he says, "they were not monks at all; now they are a half-way kind of people, monks in what suits them, non-monks in what they don't like." "They have nested themselves in everywhere and make a regular business of hunting up boys to be trained." A clever lad of quick parts was an especial prize. "They ply him with torments, break him with threats, reproofs, and many other arts, and call this 'training.' Thus they mould him for the monastic life. If this is not 'man-stealing,' what is?"

One might have supposed that the more stupid the boy, the greater the reason for urging him to a life whose essence is described as stupidness; but Erasmus declares the opposite and makes himself the illustration. All these devices were tried upon him. Violence worked as badly with him then as ever afterward, and so one of the teachers, for whom he shows some real affection, was set to try the method of persuasion. Erasmus, however, declared that he was too young, that he knew neither the world nor himself, and that it seemed much wiser for him to pass some years yet in the study of good literature before making so important a decision. These were not bad people; they were simply ignorant men, shut up in a corner, always comparing themselves one with the other, but never with men of the world—what could be expected of them but narrowness and bigotry? In the reflected light of later years the great scholar saw himself already at fourteen the champion of pure learning as against the benumbing influence of the schools.

A final assault was made by one of the guardians. Erasmus and his elder brother—we are following the Grunnius letter—had prepared themselves by an agreement to stand by each other. The younger was to be spokesman and was very doubtful of the elder's firmness of purpose. The guardian came in all kindness to congratulate the boys on their good fortune in having, through his good offices, obtained a place among the canons. Erasmus thanked him kindly, but said, as he had said to his teacher, that they had decided not to venture upon this unknown way of life until they should have gained in years and knowledge. The guardian, instead of being pleased with the manliness of the answer, "flared up as if someone had struck him, could hardly keep his hands off them, and began to call names,"—"you recognise the voice of the monks," Erasmus adds slyly to the papal secretary. The end of it was that the guardian threw up his trust, declared that the boys' estate was all spent and they might see to it how they got on in the world. "Very well," Erasmus heard himself saying through his tears, "we accept your resignation and release you from all care of us."

Then the guardian sent his brother, a man famous for his gentle ways. He invited the lads into the garden, offered them wine, and with all gentleness entertained them with the marvellous charms of the monastic life. "Many a lie he told them of the wondrous happiness of that institution." At this the elder gave way, and this gives Erasmus a pretext for an assault upon the good name of his dead brother—supposing this brother to be a real person. He was a dull fellow, eager only for gain, sly, crafty, a wine-bibber and worse—"in short, so different from the younger that one might think him a changeling; for he had nothing in common with him but his evil genius."

Hereupon follows Erasmus' famous description of the pressure which finally drove him into the monastery. It is plainly a work of literary art, with little of the directness of simple truth; but we have no reason to doubt that it fairly represents one side of the impressions under which a youth of Erasmus' tastes and condition would naturally be brought. He describes it as a conspiracy deliberately set in motion by a hostile guardian, but one hardly needs this explanation to account for the fact that a lad in the year of grace 1483 should hear every manner of description of the monastic life. These things were in the air. To be a scholar had, up to that time, been almost the same thing as to be a monk, and if Erasmus desired to be a scholar, here was, apparently, the line of least resistance.

The youth was at that crisis which comes to every young man, when for the first time he is called upon to decide for himself, with such help as he can get from others, what course of life he ought to follow. He describes himself as just entering upon his sixteenth year, without experience of the world and by nature disinclined to everything but study; of frail body, though strong enough for mental occupation. He had passed all his life in schools and believed that the low fever, from which he had suffered more than a year, was the consequence of this narrow and dreary training. Deserted on every side, with no one to turn to,—was not this enough to break a tender youth like him?

Still he held out, and then began a new series of persecutions. "Monks and semi-monks, relatives, both male and female, young and old, known and unknown," were set upon him.

"Some of these," he says, "were such natural born fools that if it had not been for their sacred garments, they might have gone about as clowns with cap and bells. Others sinned through superstition rather than through any ill-will,—but what matters it whether one be choked to death by folly or by evil intention? One painted a lovely picture of monastic repose, picking out only the most attractive features;—why, the quartan fever itself might be made attractive after this fashion."

Another gave an overdrawn picture of the evils of this world—as if monks were not of this world! Indeed they do represent themselves as safe on board ship while all the rest of the world is struggling in the waves and must surely perish unless they cast out a spar or a rope. Another spread before his eyes the frightful torments of hell—as if there were no open road from the monasteries into hell!

Others sought to alarm him with "old wives' tales" of prodigies and monstrous visions. They praised the monkish communion in good works, "as if they had a superfluity of these, when really they need the mercy of God more than laymen." In short, there was no engine of any sort that was not set at work on the poor lad, and they spent upon him as much energy as would go to the taking of an opulent city. So he hung "between the victim and the knife," waiting for some god to show him a hope of safety, when by chance he met an old friend who had been from his earliest years an inmate of the monastery at Steyn, near Gouda. This Cantelius, or Cornelius, whom Erasmus describes as driven into the monastery partly by the love of ease and good living, partly as a last resort, because he had failed to make his fortune in Italy, conceived a mighty affection for the boy and joined in the chorus of exhortation. Especially, knowing his taste, he dwelt upon the abundance of books and the leisure for study until "to hear him one would suppose that this was not so much a monastery as a garden of the Muses." Erasmus returned this affection, "ignorant as yet of human nature and judging others by himself." Cornelius left no stone unturned, but still Erasmus resisted, until finally some "yet more powerful battering-rams" were applied. What these were he does not precisely say, but only enumerates again the loss of property and the pressure of his friends. At last, "rather tormented than persuaded," he goes back to Cornelius, "tantum fabulandi gratia,"—whatever he may wish to imply by that,—and consents to try the experiment, without, however, committing himself to remain permanently. His only condition was that he would not go to "the filthy, unwholesome place, unfit for oxen, which his guardian had recommended."

Still Erasmus cannot help fancying himself abused. He was charmingly treated; no duties were pressed upon him; everybody flattered him and coddled him to his heart's content. He had a capital chance to read all the "good literature" he wished, for Cornelius soon came to regard him as a kind of private tutor and kept him at it whole nights long, much to the injury, he says, of his poor little body. "After all," thought Erasmus, "this was what the selfish fellow wanted me here for." In a few months the friends had thus read through the principal Latin authors; so that this novitiate must have been for Erasmus a time of great profit along the very line for which he professed unlimited enthusiasm.

As the time drew near for putting off the secular and donning the "religious" garb, the same conflict is repeated. Erasmus, looking back upon his youth, says that his only ambition was for scholarship, pure and simple, and that, therefore, his natural wish was to go to a university. His experience in the monastery had made it clear to him that this was not the life he wished to lead, but precisely why, he does not satisfactorily explain. Reasons, indeed, he gives in plenty: his health was not good; he needed plenty of good food and at regular intervals; he could not bear to be broken of his sleep, and so forth. His delicate constitution was plainly a source of pride to him as evidence of a finer spirit than those about him possessed.

"All these things are a mere joke to the coarse-bred beasts who would thrive on hay and enjoy it. But skilled physicians know that this delicacy is the peculiarity of a specially refined body and of the rarer spirits, and prescribe for them food cooked so as to be digestible and eaten frequently but sparingly; whereas you will find others who, if you once fill them up, can hold out a long time without inconvenience, like vultures."

Especially against fish, Erasmus says, he had such a loathing that the very smell of it gave him a headache and fever.

These objections are highly trivial. They agree, for one thing, very ill with Erasmus' charges against monks, for of all things he accuses them most often of easy and luxurious living. There were ways enough, as he found out afterward for his own convenience, of getting around the burdensome requirements of the cloister and, on the other hand, out of these very restrictions there had gone forth many a vigorous leader of human thought and action. The fact is, probably, that Erasmus felt already stirring within him that restless impulse towards the free, unfettered development of his own individuality which was to be the guide and motive of his life. He accepted the monastery because under the circumstances there was nothing else to do; but it could not satisfy him.

Such, at all events, is the impression he desired to produce when writing this account. He says:

"In such a place learning had neither honour nor use. He [meaning himself] was not an enemy of piety, but had no liking for formulas and ceremonies in which pretty much their whole life consists. Besides, in an association like this, as a rule the dull of intellect are put to the front, half fools, who love their bellies more than letters. If any exceptional talent appears among them, one who is born for learning, he is crushed down lest he rise to distinction. And yet such creatures must have a tyrant, and it generally happens that the dullest and wickedest, if only he be of sturdy body, is of most account in the gang. Now then, consider what a cross it would be for a man born to the Muses to pass his whole life among such persons. There is no hope of deliverance unless, perchance, one might be set over a convent of virgins, and that is the worst slavery there is."

Here indeed we may see what was really troubling Erasmus. It was not any special hostility to the monastery. It was a dread of anything and anybody that could make any lasting claims upon him. The monastery simply came in for a larger share of his abuse because its claim upon him was more burdensome and more evident. It was not true that a man bred a monk could not rise to almost any distinction in almost any field. The times just before Erasmus were filled with examples of men who, through their own talent and energy, had made their monastic connection the ladder by which they had mounted to far-reaching usefulness. Even Luther, fiery spirit as he was, worked his way to liberty along the path of monastic conformity.

For Erasmus a thorough-going conformity to anything was an impossibility. Making all allowance for the effect of later experience upon his record of youthful feeling, we may well believe that he really felt at the moment of his struggle something of what he puts into his defence:

"What could such a mind and such a body do in a monastery? As well put a fish into a meadow or an ox into the sea. When those fathers knew this, if there had been a spark of true human love in them, ought they not, of their own accord, to have come to the aid of his youthful ignorance or thoughtlessness and have advised him thus: 'My son, it is idle to make a hopeless struggle; you are not suited to this way of life nor this way of life to you; choose another while as yet no harm is done. Christ dwelleth everywhere, not here alone; piety may be cultivated under any garment, if only the heart be right. We will help you to return to liberty under suitable guardians and friends, so that in future you may not be a burden to us, nor we prove your destruction.'[22] That would have been a speech worthy indeed of pious men. But no one gave a word of warning; nay, rather, they moved their whole machinery to prevent this one poor little tunny from being drawn out of the net."

Above all, he says, they worked upon his acute sense of shame. If he should turn back now he would be disgraced in the sight of God and man. His friends and guardians again joined in the cry and finally

"by baseness they conquered. The youth, with abhorrence in his heart and with reluctant words, was compelled to take the cowl, precisely as captives in war offer their hands to the victor to be bound, or as conquered men go through protracted torments, not because they will, but because it pleases their master. He overcame his spirit, but no man can make his body over new. The youth did as men in prison do, consoled himself with study as far as it was permitted him;—for this had to be done secretly, while drunkenness was openly tolerated."

It has seemed worth while to follow rather closely this account of his early years, as given chiefly by Erasmus himself, partly because it is almost our only source of information and partly because it gives at the outset so good an illustration of his way of dressing up every subject he touched to suit the occasion.[23] His biographers have generally done little more than copy out the Grunnius letter as an authentic record of his early experience, and its contents have become the common property of our books of reference. It must, however, be carefully studied in view of the circumstances under which it was written and by comparison with the little we can learn from other sources. Especially must all Erasmus' later criticism of the monastic life be referred to one of his earliest literary performances, the treatise, On the Contempt of the World (de contemptu mundi), written, probably, while he was still at Steyn, and when he was about twenty years old. This is an essay on the charms of the monastery as compared to "the world." It purports to be written by a monk to a nephew who was considering how his life should be spent. Excepting in the concluding paragraph there is hardly an indication of even a question as to the superiority of the solitary life over the life of society. The tone throughout is serious to the point of dulness. There is hardly a trace of the sparkle and liveliness which marked most of Erasmus' later writing. He begins with the same laboured comparison between human life and a troubled sea which he later ridicules:—the sea with its storms, its hidden rocks, its violent alternations, its siren voices luring the sailor to destruction. There is danger on the land, but one is far nearer to it on the sea. Life offers many joys, but none to compare with safety. Earthly joys are so hedged about with miseries that they lose their proper charm.

"Oh, bitter sweetness, so walled in before, behind and on every side with wretchedness. I said just now that man was coming to the condition of the brutes; but here I think the brutes have greatly the advantage of us; for they enjoy freely whatever pleasures they will. But man,—good God! how brief and how low a thing is this tickling of the throat and the belly!"

Marriage is all very well for those who cannot live otherwise, but it is a necessary evil. Earthly honours are vain and fleeting. If the great king Alexander himself could look upon the present world he would unquestionably warn us that even his unparalleled powers and dignities were as nothing compared with the victory of the man who knows how to govern himself. Death makes an end of all and does not wait for all to come to maturity, but cuts down many in the flower of their youth.

Then the argument turns to the positive attractions of the monastery and these are chiefly three: liberty, tranquillity, and happiness. As to the last two the line of defence is tolerably obvious; but to represent the monastery as the abode of liberty required no little ingenuity. Erasmus solved the difficulty by showing that all the relations of human life were but so many restraints on personal freedom, while the life in the monastery, imposing limits only upon the body, allows the soul to enjoy the highest kind of freedom.

Now which of these documents, the de contemptu mundi, written at the time, or the Grunnius letter written perhaps thirty years afterward, represents the true Erasmus as he was at the age of twenty? If one tries to form an opinion from facts rather than from words, one must feel that there is at least room for the question. Erasmus speaks in the letter as if his intellectual life had been utterly crushed by the discipline of the monastery, but on the other hand there is every indication that he had all the opportunity for study that he could desire. Even if we think of the de contemptu mundi as a mere piece of sophomoric composition, it shows a very great acquisition, both of knowledge and of power, in a lad of twenty. It cannot have been written to please any teacher, for he was at this time under no regular instruction.

He was no longer at school, but was simply educating himself by the only pedagogical method which ever yet produced any results anywhere,—namely, by the method of his own tireless energy in continuous study and practice. This essay shows a command of classic literature in quotation and allusion quite inconceivable except as a result of persistent study. Almost as much may be said of the style. If it lacks much of the vivacity and personality of the later Erasmus, it has already gained a very considerable degree of correctness and force. The conclusion is irresistible that the description of the charm of the monastery as a place of refuge from the distractions of the world, and as affording leisure for the higher life, is a fair reflection of Erasmus' own experience up to that time. The monastery had served his purpose and now he was ready for something wider and freer, but he could not justify his quitting the monastic life without piling charges upon charges against the institution that had tided over for him, as gently as its conditions permitted, these years of helplessness.

Nor had his life been by any means a solitary one. He had formed an intimate friendship with a certain William Hermann of Gouda and with him "he spent," says Beatus, "days and nights over his books. There was not a volume of the Latin authors which he had not thoroughly studied. The time which their companions basely spent in games, in sleep, in guzzling, these two spent in turning over books and in improving their style."

Another friendship dating from this period was that with Servatius, a fellow-monk and afterward prior of Steyn. No one of Erasmus' correspondents seems to have stood nearer to his heart. The group of letters addressed to him, probably just before and just after the writer had left the monastery, show a warmth of affection and a real desire for affection in return which bear every mark of sincerity. Even long after their ways had parted for ever Erasmus writes to Servatius with a respect which has no tinge of bitterness in it. If his hatred of monasticism had been as furious as he would often have men believe, hardly anyone would have been a more natural victim for him than this prior of the house where he is popularly believed to have suffered such a grievous experience.

So far as the two things which he always described as the requisites of a happy life, books and friendship, could go, the life of Erasmus at Steyn ought to have been a happy one.

Let us add one more contribution to the problem,—a letter[24] written at the age of sixty to a certain monk who had grown restless during the stirring time of the Reformation:

"I congratulate you on your bodily health, but am very sorry to hear of your distress of mind.... I fear you have been imposed upon by the trickery of certain men who are bragging nowadays, with splendid phrases, of their apostolic liberty. Believe me, if you knew more of the affair, your own form of life would be less wearisome to you. I see a kind of men springing up, from which my very soul revolts. I see that no one is growing better, but all are growing worse, so far at least as I have made their acquaintance, so that I greatly regret that formerly I advocated in writing the liberty of the spirit, though I did this with a good purpose and with no suspicion that a generation like this would come into being....

"You have lived now so many years in your community without blame, and now, as you say, your life is inclining toward its evening—you may be eight or nine years my junior. You are living in a most comfortable place, and in a most healthful climate. You derive great happiness from the conversation of learned men; you have plenty of good books and a clever talent. What can be sweeter in this world than to wander in such meadows and taste beforehand, as it were, the joys of the heavenly life? especially at your age and in these days, the most turbulent and ruinous that ever were. I have known some, who, deceived by the phantom of liberty, have deserted their orders. They changed their dress and took to themselves wives, destitute meanwhile, living as exiles and hateful to their relatives to whom they had been dear....

"Finally, my dearest brother in Christ, by our ancient and unbroken friendship and by Christ I beg, I beseech, I implore you to put this discontent wholly out of your mind; and to give no ear to the fatal discourses of men who will bring you no comfort, but will rather laugh at you when they have trapped you into their snare. If with your whole heart you shall turn yourself entirely to meditation on the heavenly life, believe me you will find abundant consolation, and that little restlessness you speak of will vanish like smoke."

CHAPTER II
PARIS AND HOLLAND
1492-1498

It may well be doubted, especially in view of his later experience, whether a residence at Paris or at any other university during just these years of probation would have been more profitable to Erasmus than his life at Steyn. He had been learning the invaluable lesson of self-education, and all his life was to be the richer for it. No doubt he was beginning to be restless under restraint, and thinking, as any monk had a perfect right to do, of how he might widen his opportunity.

He says, we remember, that there was no way out of the monastic life except to become the head of a nunnery, a remark so obviously foolish that it is worth recalling only to notice how completely his own experience contradicted it.

The Bishop of Cambrai, planning to go to Italy, wanted a young scholar of good parts to help him out with his necessary Latin. He had heard of Erasmus, how we do not know, and invited him to join his court and make the Italian journey with him. This may well have seemed to the young man a glorious opportunity. Italy was then, even more than it has ever been since, the goal toward which every ambitious youth of scholarly taste naturally turned. Doubtless, also, in the larger liberty (or bondage) of the great world, his monastic experience seemed narrow and sordid enough. He calls the Bishop his god ἀπὸ μηχανῆς. "Had it not been for this deliverance his distinguished talent would have rotted in idleness, in luxury and in revelling." Evidently he would have had no reason to dread the severity of discipline for which he fancied his health was too delicate. The Bishop made sure of his prize by securing the approval of the Bishop of Utrecht, in whose diocese the monastery lay, and also of the prior and the general of the order. The excellent prior himself had long been convinced that Erasmus and the monastery were unsuited to each other and had recommended him to take some such opportunity as now offered.[25] This was the kind of especially unreasoning beast whom Erasmus says the monks were wont to choose for their tyrant!

The relation into which Erasmus now entered with the Bishop of Cambrai was one of the most agreeable that could present itself to a young scholar. It demanded of him but small services, and those of a kind most attractive to him, and yet it gave him a sense of usefulness which saved his self-respect. As a member of the Bishop's household his living was provided for, and leisure was secured for the studies toward which he was now eagerly looking forward. Once for all we have to bear in mind in studying the life of a scholar, that pure scholarship is never, and never has been, self-supporting. The only question has been how to provide for its maintenance in ways least dangerous to its integrity and least offensive to its own sense of dignity. In our day we are familiar with endowments by which the earlier stages of the scholar's life are made accessible to talent without wealth, but in its later stages scholarship is held to a pretty strict account and is expected to give a very tangible quid pro quo for all it receives.

In Erasmus' time this dependence of learning upon endowment was more frankly acknowledged, and might be indefinitely prolonged. Undoubtedly the easiest form of such dependence was the monastic. There is no doubt that Erasmus' de contemptu mundi gives a perfectly fair ideal picture of the normal monastic liberty and its suitableness for the scholar, but for him this life had also its dangers and its limitations. Next to the endowment through the monastery there was provision by private patronage. It had come to be more than ever before in Europe, the duty and the pride of all princes, lay and clerical, to devote some part of the revenue which came from their people to promoting their higher intellectual interests. Scholars were thought of as a decoration as indispensable to the well equipped princely court as was the court jester or the private religious counsellor.

With the progress of a new classic culture, all public documents were taking on a higher tone and demanded a more highly trained body of scholars for their preparation. But such a position might become laborious, too mechanical and professional for men of real genius. Then there was the alternative of teaching, either privately in the employ of some rich family, or publicly at a university. In Erasmus' time we find traces of university freedom, but they were not significant of the normal condition of things. The university was a great corporation with a reputation to keep up, and compelled to preserve at least a decent uniformity in its instruction. A man of independent genius could hardly have found himself entirely at his ease there, even if he were able to win one of the endowments by which to live. We shall see that Erasmus was not attracted by the university career, and only resorted to the method of private tutoring when other resources failed.

Another form of endowment of scholarship was through the application of church foundations to this purpose. Of course this was in a sense a perversion of trusts, but there were many excuses for it. For one thing, the ends of religion and of education have always, under Christianity, been largely identified. Even in our own country, and down to the present moment, endowments for education have been almost primarily thought of as made in the service of religion. The prime function of Christian scholarship has been the maintenance of the religious tradition. So that, when a man was given a "living" out of church funds, it was felt that he might properly make use of this income to carry on his personal studies. Especially if, as a result of those studies, he produced works of religious edification, the purpose of the endowment was not thought to be violated. Furthermore, if with this endowment there were connected distinct duties involving the "cure of souls," no one was shocked if the scholarly holder of the "living" hired a lesser talent with a small percentage of the income to perform these duties, while he himself devoted his leisure to the higher studies for which he was fitted. Such a living may fairly be compared to a university scholarship in our day—as in fact the majority of our American scholarships will be found to have a religious origin.

It must have required an unusual sense of the fitness of things for a man of Erasmus' time to decline so easy and so honourable a means of subsistence. What his own real views on the subject were we shall have occasion to see later when the temptation comes to him. Enough to say here that, at least so far as the cure of souls was concerned, it seemed to him, in his better moments, a scandal that the man who did the work of a "living" should not receive at least a large part of its emoluments. Doubtless, also, the sense of confinement, always an unbearable one to Erasmus, had its part in making a church benefice unacceptable to him. Another consideration no doubt had its weight. The mediæval scholar had served the cause of religion by agreeing in every detail with its traditions as the organised church handed them to him. The scholar of the Renaissance, though he might be equally devoted to the religious system, thought of his learning as something having an independent right to existence, and might well hesitate to commit himself to such obligations toward the traditional views of religion as were implied in the holding of a clerical office.

Distinctly the most agreeable form of support for the scholar of the early Renaissance was a regular pension from some rich patron. He had no need to feel himself humbled by this relation, for he could always fall back on the pleasant reflection that he was giving back to his patron in honour quite as much as he received from him in money. In fact, this was the very essence of such patronage. The relation was quite different from that of the public official, clerk, secretary, or what not, hired to perform a definite kind of service. It was a relation of honour, not to be reduced to commercial terms. The money given was not paid for the scholar's services; it was given to secure him the leisure needed for the proper pursuit of his own scholarly aims. It bound him only to diligence in pure scholarship, not to a servile flattery of his patron, nor to any direct furtherance of the patron's ends.

Plainly this system was open to abuses; but so is every relation of honour between men, and even the more exposed to abuse in proportion as it calls upon the principle of honour and not upon that of commercial equivalents. The quid pro quo is the scholar's devotion to the highest aims of scholarship, and if he fulfils his part to the best of his ability he may hold up his head in the presence of any man, even in an age of exclusively commercial standards.

All these forms of support were at one time or another employed by Erasmus. He seems to have disliked teaching, both public and private, though the evidence points towards his success, at least in the latter kind. The cure of souls he never undertook, but was willing to accept livings, if he were permitted to resign them for a handsome percentage as pension. Excepting with the bishop of Cambrai he never stood to any patron in the relation of secretary, clerk, librarian, or in any other similar form of service. His choice was a good liberal pension, and as to the quid pro quo, there was never in his case any room for doubt.

Whatever else Erasmus was, he certainly was not lazy. The impulse to produce was in him an irresistible one. All he asked was opportunity, and the several patrons who, from time to time, contributed to his support must have felt that on his side the point of honour was fully met. One other consideration will perhaps help us to understand the exact feeling of Erasmus in entering upon what seems to us, perhaps, a condition of personal dependence. How, we may ask, could any man have that confidence in his own talent which would assure him against the dread that after all he might prove a bad investment? The answer is twofold: the man must have a profound confidence either in the greatness of the cause he stands for or in his own surpassing merit. In Erasmus both these elements of assurance were united. He always thought and spoke of pure scholarship, when applied to the advancement of a pure Christianity, as the noblest occupation of man, and he shared in a high degree that exaggerated sense of personal importance which is the especial mark of the Renaissance scholar.

The acceptance of a pension from a private person was, then, the most untrammelled form of financial dependence which a poor scholar could assume, and it is the form chosen by Erasmus whenever he had an opportunity of choice. His first relation to the bishop of Cambrai was, indeed, intended to be one of actual, definite service. He was to go with him to Italy as his Latin secretary, and might well feel that he was to give a fair equivalent for his support. The journey to Italy, however, was indefinitely postponed. Erasmus says the bishop could not afford it. Meanwhile the young scholar lived at the episcopal court until, as the Italian plan seemed to be abandoned, the bishop gave him money enough to get to Paris. He promised a regular pension, but it was not forthcoming: "such is the way of princes."[26]

As to further detail of the life of Erasmus with the bishop we are quite in the dark. Even how long he was there is not clear and is cheerfully disregarded by most recent writers. It would probably be safe to conclude with Drummond that it was not more than about two years and that Erasmus' residence at Paris, therefore, began about 1491 or 1492, when he was about twenty-five years of age. As he had up to this time consistently complained of every situation in which he had found himself, we shall be quite prepared to find him making the worst possible of a manner of life which at the best cannot have been too attractive to a lover of ease and comfort.

The organisation of the University was such that the instruction was largely separate from the detail of discipline and maintenance of the student. Each student lived as he could, sought the teaching of such masters as suited his immediate purpose, and presented himself for academic honours whenever he was ready. A student of means lodged at his own cost in a private house or private Hall, and lived subject only to the general discipline of the University and the town. For poor students there existed, as in England, "colleges"—i. e., primarily lodging- and boarding-houses under a stricter oversight. These colleges were not primarily intended to provide instruction, a function which was only gradually assumed by them as their endowments grew to be larger than were needed to provide the ordinary necessities of living. Their teachers were rather tutors or "coaches" than men of independent scholarship; their function was to supplement by repetition and personal attention the public teaching of the more eminent university professors.

The Collége Montaigu, into which Erasmus entered, was a foundation of some antiquity, but during the previous generation had fallen into complete decay, so that nothing was left of it but the buildings. About 1480 it had taken a new lease of life under one John Standonch,[27] who devoted himself to its service. As master of the college he could make something by teaching, and gradually, through his own activity and that of his fellows, had got together enough so that he could give lodging and partial board to a certain number of poor students. By the year 1493 he was thus partially maintaining over eighty. The rest of their support they got as they could, by begging or otherwise.

Erasmus was, then, a charity boarder and ought, in all reason, to have been grateful for even this poor opportunity of enjoying the privileges toward which he had for years been looking forward as the summit of his hopes. Yet he can nowhere mention these Parisian days without the most doleful complaints of his sufferings from foul air, bad food, and severe discipline. The most famous of these diatribes occurs in the Colloquy called Ἰχθυοφαγία—"The Eating of Fish." Erasmus' theme is here the excessive devotion to formal rules and observances in religion to the sacrifice of more important things. The eating of fish is only a text on which he hangs extremely bold and acute criticism of would-be religious persons, who for their lives would not violate the rules of the Church against the eating of meat, but were ready on the other hand to run into any excesses of fleshly dissipation. The speakers are a butcher and a salt-fishmonger. After they have gone on matching stories for a long time, the fishmonger suddenly breaks out:

[28] "'Thirty years ago I lived at Paris in a college which has its name from vinegar (acetum).' [The Latin form of Montaigu was Mons acutus.] The butcher answers: 'Well, that is a name of wisdom! What are you giving us? A salt-fishmonger in such a sour college? No wonder he's such a keen one at quibbles of theology! For there, as I hear, the very walls have theological minds.'

"Fishm.—'You're right, but all I got there was a body infected with the worst kind of humours and a plentiful supply of lice. But let me go on as I began. The college was at that time governed by John Standonch, a man whose disposition (affectum) you would not condemn, but in whom you would like to see more discrimination. For you couldn't help greatly approving his regard for the poor, mindful as he was of his own youth passed in extreme poverty. If he had so far relieved the poverty of youths that they might go on with honest study, yet not so far that abundance would have led to extravagance, he would have deserved praise. But he went into the thing with beds so hard, food so coarse and so scanty, vigils and work so severe that within a year the first trial brought many youths of excellent parts and of great promise, some to their deaths, some to blindness, some to madness and not a few to leprosy. Some of these I knew myself, and surely not one escaped danger. Now can't anybody see that that is cruelty to one's neighbour? And not content with this he put on (them) hood and cloak and took from them all animal food—and then he transferred such nursery-gardens as this into far-distant regions. If every one should indulge his impulses (affectus) as far as he did, the result would be that the like of these people would fill up the whole world. From such beginnings arose monasteries, which now threaten both kings and pontiffs. It is a pious deed to boast of bringing one's neighbour to piety, but to seek for glory by one's dress or one's food is the part of a Pharisee; it is piety to relieve the want of one's neighbours, and to see to it that they do not abuse the generosity of good men by excess, is good discipline. But to drive your brother by these things into sickness, into madness and death, that is cruelty, that is murder. The intention to kill is perhaps wanting, but the murder is there all the same. What forgiveness shall these men have then? The same as a physician, who, through notable lack of skill, kills a patient. Does anyone say:—"but no one forces them into this mode of life; they come of their own accord; they long to be admitted and are free to leave when they are tired of it"? Ah! An answer worthy of a Scythian. They do ask this, as youths who know what is good for them better than a man of years, full of learning and experience! Thus might one excuse himself to a famished wolf, after he had drawn him into a trap with bait. Can one who has put unwholesome or even poisonous food before a frightfully hungry man excuse himself by saying:—"Nobody compels you to eat; you have willingly and gladly devoured what was set before you"? Would he not properly reply:—"You have given me not food but poison"? Necessity is a mighty weapon; hunger is a terrible torment. So let them do away with that high-sounding phrase:—"the choice was free," for he who uses such torments is really using force. Nor has this cruelty ruined poor men alone; it has carried off many a rich man's son and corrupted many a well-born talent.'"

So Erasmus goes on to tell other details of student-life at Montaigu. In the depths of winter a bit of bread was given out for food and they were obliged to draw water from a polluted well. Some of the sleeping-rooms were on the ground-floor and in such close neighbourhood to the common resort that anyone who lived there was sure to get his death or a dangerous illness. Frightful beatings were inflicted even on the innocent, "in order, as they say, to take the ferocity out of them,—for so they call a noble spirit,—and break it down on purpose to make them fit for monasteries. How many rotten eggs were devoured there! What a quantity of foul wine was drunk!"

And then, having made his fishmonger say all the vile things about Montaigu that he can think of, Erasmus, true to his nature, begins to hedge. Perhaps these things have been corrected since, but this is too late for those who are dead or are carrying about the seeds of disease in their bodies. Nor does he say all this from any ill-will to the college, but only to warn against the corruption of youth through the cruelty of man under the disguise of religion. He protests that if he could see good results from the monastic life he would urge everyone to take the cowl. In fact, however, he seldom goes into a Carthusian house without finding there someone who is either gone silly or is a regular madman. There can be no doubt that the rules for the Collége Montaigu published by Master Standonch in 1501 were sufficiently harsh. They were so made in order to check the abuse of too great freedom for the very young boys admitted to such foundations. In confirmation of Erasmus' picture of the horrors of Montaigu we find regularly quoted Rabelais' famous passage[29] in which the youth Gargantua on his return from Paris combs cannon-balls out of his hair and thus gives occasion to his father and tutor for an attack upon this same "college of vermin" as the haunt of cruelty and wretchedness. When Rabelais wrote this passage he had not yet been at Paris. It is practically certain that he was acquainted with the writings of Erasmus, and the conclusion seems obvious that he borrowed his illustration directly from the Ichthyophagia.

This description of "Vinegar College" has been almost universally taken as a serious account of Erasmus' own experience in Paris, and probably it has its foundation of truth. The commonest laws of sanitary decency are a thing almost of our own day, and not much more can be said of the principles of proper food and care of the body. No one could expect much from a charity-school in the fifteenth century. But these stories must be considered in their context. They are introduced, not as actual autobiography, but as illustrations of one of Erasmus' favourite themes, the evils of monasticism, and especially they are made to bear on an idea which seems to have been almost an idée fixe with him,—that all the powers of religion and learning were in league to drive young men into monasteries. As before in his recollections of Deventer and Steyn, so now here in his memories of the Collége Montaigu, this spectre still, after thirty years, haunts his imagination. He forgets that he was enjoying the fruits of the devotion and self-sacrifice of the founders and interprets all their actions by this same governing motive. He had called his schools "seminaria" for monks; now he calls his Paris college a "plantarium" for the same kind of a crop.

In fact, these early studies at the University were full of profit to Erasmus. He was at the centre of the best culture of the earlier time and the reviving spirit of the new classic learning was beginning to make itself felt. In his references to this experience it suited his purpose and his disposition always to throw contempt upon his teachers and upon all learning except that which seemed to him to reflect the glory of antiquity. Indeed, if he had been forced to content himself with the dry quibbling of the "Scotist" theologians who were still the dominant party at Paris, he would have found himself in dreary company enough. But we find no reason to think that there was any compulsion upon him to take any teaching he did not like. Greek had already begun to make its way as an attainable subject at Paris, and Erasmus was beginning to feel the charm which this, the choicest vehicle of human expression, was to exercise upon his whole life.

His first Paris residence was interrupted by illness, in consequence of which he returned for a time to the bishop of Cambrai. The bishop seems to have been willing to keep him indefinitely at his court, but not to have provided for his further maintenance elsewhere. With restored health Erasmus was back again at Paris and now, for the first time, on a really independent footing. For the moment he ceased to consider the question of patronage and began to give lessons to private pupils. Beatus, unquestionably prompted by Erasmus in all details, says that "the Englishmen at the university could find no one among the professors of liberal study in the whole place who was able to teach more learnedly or accustomed to teach more conscientiously." And then he goes on to make a comparison between this youth and the two best-known professors of literature at the time in Paris. One of these, Faustus Andrelinus, was evidently a type of the gay, reckless spirits who found in classic study an enjoyment purely intellectual and who used its moral standard as an excuse for all looseness of life. His manner of teaching was "popular" to the point of flippancy, designed rather to catch the applause of the crowd than to merit the approval of the learned. It is to Erasmus' credit that he did not allow his classic enthusiasm to carry away his judgment of this person. The other teacher, Gaguinus, was a more serious scholar, but not so far advanced and not yet regularly teaching publicly.

So it appears that, in spite of his doleful stories, our scholar had as usual been making the most of his time, and we come now happily to a point where evident facts and the testimony of other men can be made use of to show his growing value and power. There seems little reason to doubt that he was now a distinctly popular figure in academic circles. He was in steady demand as a private tutor for young men who could afford to pay well for his services. Among such youths Englishmen, then as ever since, were naturally most prominent, and it is through this relation to English pupils at Paris that the way was opened for Erasmus to many of the most interesting and important connections of his later life.

During this second Paris residence, Erasmus evidently got into some rather serious scrape, of which we get only vague suggestions in his correspondence. What it was and precisely the nature of the charges it brought upon him we cannot say. It seems to have had some connection with his relation to a mysterious personage, who has been supposed to be almost every possible person from the bishop of Cambrai down. Froude, in his hit-or-miss fashion, suggests that this person, whom Erasmus always refers to as senex ille, was the aged Marquis of Veere in Holland, son of a bastard of Duke Philip of Burgundy. Unfortunately for this theory, the Marquis of Veere was already dead and is of interest to Erasmus only on account of his charming widow, who at about this time begins to dawn on his horizon as a possible patroness. Beatus tells us with a word that Erasmus after his Montaigu experience went over (emigravit) to a certain noble Englishman who had with him two noble youths, of whom Beatus thinks Lord Mountjoy was one. This Mountjoy was certainly a pupil and afterward a faithful friend of Erasmus, and we have references to the "old man" in letters to Mountjoy which show plainly that the young nobleman was a confidant of the writer in the Paris unpleasantness, whatever that may have been. The same is also true of the other English youth whom Erasmus now met and learned to love, Thomas Grey, son of the Marquis of Dorset. An extract from a letter to him will give us an indication of how our scholar had got on in the art of vigorous expression. The letter[30] is dated at Paris, 1497 (?), and was evidently written soon after the trouble of which the old man is the alleged cause. It begins with extravagant expressions of affection for Grey. "Of the whole race of men none is dearer to me than you." He would have written him earlier, but dreaded to open up again the wound which he was just hoping would begin to heal.

"Nothing is more intolerable," he goes on, "than abuse in return for kindness. Would that I might drink so deep of the waters of Lethe that that old man and his insults might wholly flow forth out of my mind. As often as I think of him I not only fall into a rage, but I marvel that so much poison, so much envy, treachery and faithlessness could dwell in a human breast. So help me God! when I think of the scoundrelly soul of that man, the Poets, men so keen, so eloquent, in describing human nature, seem to me either never to have seen poison of this sort or to have been unequal to its description. For what panderer so false, what ruffian so boastful, what old man so ill-conditioned, or what monster so envious, so full of bitterness, so ungrateful, have they ever dared to depict, as this old humbug, who even sets up for a pietist and invents fine names for his very vices? You bid me not to be distressed, and indeed, my dear Thomas, I am bearing the thing patiently when you think how horrible it is. So unexpected misfortunes can but grieve one. How ever could I, in return for my frankness, my kindnesses, my faithfulness, my almost brotherly affection, expect from a man so venerable as he appeared, so noble as he boasted himself to be, so pious as he pretended, such extraordinary abuse? I supposed it to be basest ingratitude not to return favour for favour. I had read that there was a kind of men whom it was safer to offend than to oblige by kindness. I did not believe, until I had learned it by experience, that it was far more dangerous to do good to evil men than evil to good men. For when the ungrateful rascal found that he was under greater obligations to me than he could repay, he turned his attention away from literature, which he had been wretchedly tormenting up to that time, and bent all his energies to ruining me with his infamous tricks. And when he despaired of doing this by his actions (laboribus) he sought to crush me with his tongue steeped in the poison of hell, and he did it, too, as far as he could. That I am alive at all, that I have my health, I ascribe to my books, which have taught me to give way to no storm of fate. It is a blow to a man thus born to crime to find that he does but little harm.

"But not satisfied with raging against me with such fury when I was present, he pursued me when I had fled from him and, out of hatred to me, rages against you, the dearest part of my soul—rages, I say, with that most terrible of human weapons, with slander. O poison of snakes, worse than any aconite, than any froth from the fangs of Cerberus! That a monster like this should gaze upon the fair light of the sun, should breathe,—nay! poison the vital air! That our common earth should bear such a disgrace! The imagination of the Poets was never able to conjure up a mischief so horrible, so pestilent, so accursed that this monster would not easily surpass it. For what Cerberus, what Sphinx, what Chimæra, what Tisiphone, what hobgoblin can rightly be compared with this evil thing which Gothia [?] has lately spewed out upon us? What scorpion, what viper, what basilisk has its poison handier? Venomous things seldom give forth their poison except when irritated. Lions repay kindness with kindness; dragons grow gentle under kind treatment; but this old man is made mad by good-will. There is a poisoned soul for you!

"Now that you may see how solid is my proof; if one marks carefully his savage face, the whole habit of his body, does not one seem to see as it were the very image of all vices? And herein is the wisdom of Nature to be praised, that she has pent this soul of deformity in a fitting body. Beneath the bristling forest of his eyebrows lurk his retreating eyes with their savage gaze. A brow of stone, that in his evil doing no blush of shame may ever be seen. His nostrils, filled with a grove of bristles, puff out a polypus. His cheeks are drooping, his lips livid, his voice belched out rather than breathed out—such is the man's impotence—you would think him barking rather than speaking. His twisted neck, his crooked legs—nothing that Nature has not branded with some stigma. So we brand criminals and malefactors; so we hang a bell upon a biting dog; so we mark a vicious ox by the hay bound about his horns.

"To share my learning with this base monster! for his sake to waste so much time, talent and energy! If this had gone for naught, I should be less wretched, for now I see that I have sown the dragon's teeth and they are springing up to my destruction."

This is about one half of the letter. It is evident that Erasmus was in good training for the choicest specimens of personal abuse which he was later to produce. The remainder of the letter is filled with flattery of young Grey laid on with as liberal a hand as was the abuse of the unfortunate "old man." The burden of this part of the letter is to console Grey for being still under the power of his tormentor, and to urge him to new effort and to self-reliance in his studies. Out of the confusion of vague references and later surmises as to who this unpleasant being was, one can get a certain unity and form such conjecture as one will. It seems probable that he was some Englishman of mature years and of good family who had been sent over to Paris as a guardian for the two young noblemen, Mountjoy and Grey; that he had engaged Erasmus as tutor, to live at their lodgings and to include himself in his instruction; that some cause, perhaps some looseness of morals on Erasmus' part, had brought them to a quarrel, in consequence of which Erasmus was forced to throw up his engagement. On the other hand, it is clear that no father would have intrusted his son to such a monster of physical and moral deformity as is here described. Just what Erasmus means by saying that "Gothia" was responsible for him I cannot make out. The whole episode is interesting only as throwing light on the development of our scholar in his style and his character.

That Erasmus, eager and diligent student as he surely was, did not entirely escape the allurements of the Latin Quarter is plain from later references of his own. Probably he is referring to some such experiences in a letter[31] written about this time to the friend whom Mr. Froude jauntily calls William Gauden, and who is the same William Hermann of Gouda to whom we have already alluded. This William had evidently written him a reproachful letter, but we do not learn clearly the grounds of his reproof. Erasmus ascribes his irritation to the tattling of some enemy and beseeches him at great length to trust rather his own personal knowledge and his memory of their lifelong friendship than any such calumny. He represents himself as plunged in the depths of misery. He would rather die than endure longer the burden of such a life. It is not life at all; it is mere existence. Doubtless this is mostly rhetoric, but the true state of the writer's mind seems to come out in a passage in which he refers to certain definite persons well known to the receiver, though obscure to us. The upshot of his gloomy reflections is:

"This is the kind of a moral atmosphere (moribus) we have to live in; and so we have to follow that saying of Chilo: 'So love as if thou wert one day to hate, and so hate as if thou wert one day to love.'"

This letter illustrates well traits of Erasmus which were to become very marked in his future work. He was already showing that joy in the idea of being persecuted which later seems to have reacted on his memory of his earliest years. It flattered his vanity to think that men cared enough about him to abuse him, and such abuse gave him an added claim upon the devotion of his friends. His nature demanded affection and admiration, and he was ready to repay them in kind, so long as he thereby incurred no lasting or burdensome obligation.

These singular contradictions of Erasmus' nature are most clearly brought out in his early correspondence with his friend Battus, a young man whom he met at Cambrai, and who became tutor to the son of the Marchioness of Veere. In connection with Battus, also, we learn to know Erasmus for the first time as a suitor for patronage. The Battus letters, some score in number, cover the period just before and just after his first trip to England, that is, about the year 1500. We are to think of him at this time as firmly fixed in his determination to be a scholar and, to this end, to get to Italy as soon as ever it might be possible. He wanted to take his doctor's degree there, and thought of Italy as a scholar's paradise. But to gain this great privilege he was not prepared for every sacrifice. One is apt to think of Erasmus as a wanderer, and with good reason, but after all he had little of the typical Bohemian in him. He was, it is true, a poor youth, but his poverty was always a comfortable poverty. There was nothing, apparently, to prevent him from taking his staff in his hand and making his way on foot, if need were, as many another poor scholar had done, to the goal of his desires. That was Luther's method of seeing Italy, under a very different impulse. Probably nothing would have done so much to chase away the megrims that were always pestering him. He would have had less reason to complain of his digestion and his bad sleeping—but if he could not have complained he would, perhaps, have been unhappier still. Meanwhile, he had to have books, he must eat only just such food as seemed to suit him, he kept a horse, and could not think of a journey without at least one servant and two horses. Italy seemed indefinitely far away. Private tutoring was a slippery source of revenue; frequent visitations of the plague scattered his pupils and he had to cast about him for ways and means. There were two resources: a place with an income and, presumably, with duties attached to it, or a patron. For obvious reasons, he preferred the latter.

Battus, his dear Battus, was pretty comfortably fixed at the castle of Tournehens on the island of Walcheren, the residence of the Marchioness of Veere. He was a good fellow and might be counted on to do his friend a good turn. We have Erasmus, then, in the Battus letters in an entirely new character,—as the flatterer of the great for his own personal advantage. The earliest indication of relations with the marchioness is in a Paris letter[32] to Battus, which begins:

"I can quite understand, Battus, best of men, how surprised you are that I don't fly to you at once, now that our affair has turned out so much better than either of us dared to hope. But when you know my reasons you will cease to wonder and will see that I have consulted your advantage no less than my own. I can hardly tell you how delighted I was at your letter. Already I am seeing visions of a happy life with you. What freedom to chatter away together! How we will live in common with our Muses! I just long to be free from this hateful slavery. 'Why then hesitate?' you say. You will see that I do so not without reason. I had not expected your messenger so soon. There are some little sums due me here, and you know very little is a great thing for me. I have unfulfilled obligations with certain persons, which I could not leave without injury. I am just beginning a month with the count; I have paid my room-rent," etc.

Then follows an account of some troubles about certain manuscripts and money lost by unsafe messengers, and then he returns to the subject of the marchioness.

"I don't need to urge you, dear Battus, for I know your loyalty and your affection, to consider at once my profit and my dignity. I am not a little in dread of a court and I am very conscious of my unlucky star. I rejoice greatly that the Lady is so favourably disposed towards me, but what says the antistes? what hope does he offer? Was ever anything colder? I would rather you had named a fixed sum than talked about a great one. I will not remind you of Vergil's line

"'... varium et mutabile semper,

Fœmina ...'

for I count her not among common women, but among those of manly quality (viragines). Yet how many are there in that place who care for my writings? or is there anyone who does not hate learning altogether? My whole fortune depends upon you. But if—which Jove forbid!—the affair should fall out contrary to both our wishes,—you, burdened with debt as you are, will be worse off in that respect, and what help, pray, can you be to me?

"I will not admit that your zeal for me is any hotter than mine for you; but I am sure we ought to take the greatest care not to be too eager in this matter. I write this not as having changed my opinion or as being fickle in my intentions, but to rouse your watchfulness; for we are both in the same position. Now if I hadn't so high an opinion of your loyalty, your prudence and your carefulness that, when I have turned the thing over to you I feel that I can sleep on both ears, I might be alarmed at this beginning of the business as at a very unfavourable omen. They have sent me a two-for-a-cent hired nag and an allowance for the journey that is just about nothing at all. Now, my dear James, if the beginning is so cold will the end be likely to boil? When will there be a more honourable or more fitting chance for you to ask a favour in my name than now, when they will have to get me away from this city and from such favouring circumstances? With such a pittance I could hardly come on foot; how should I manage it on horseback and with two companions? If the affair is to be paid for with my Lady's money, as I suppose, this beginning doesn't suit me; but if it is at your expense, I like it still less, for it would not only be unfair, but it would have to be done with borrowed money. What is more unlike the man you have always taken me for, than to come flying at the first nod and especially under such conditions? Who wouldn't think me either a greenhorn or a knave or at any rate in the last extremity? Who wouldn't despise me? If I weren't so awfully fond of you, Battus, my dear fellow, so that to live with you would repay me for any inconvenience, these things might turn me from my plans; but they don't move me in the least. I am only warning you to keep up my dignity with all diligence. Now you ask my opinion and here it is:—I will arrange my affairs here, collect my writings and settle up my business. Meanwhile you will be copying out what I send you. Write me, by the lad who they say is shortly coming hither to study, precisely how the land lies; then, when you have copied the Laurentius, send by the same lad who brings it—I mean Adrian—an allowance for the journey and some very definite statement; an allowance, mind you, suitable for me. I can't come at my own expense, dead broke as I am, and it is not right that I should leave my present fair enough position. Besides I want you to send me a better horse, if you can. I am not asking for a splendid Bucephalus, but one that a respectable man would not be ashamed to ride; and you understand that I need two horses, for I am determined to bring my servant and I intend this second horse for him. You will easily persuade my Lady of all this. You have an excellent case and I well know you are clever enough to make a good case out of the very worst. If she refuses to do this—well then, I pray you, how will she ever give a pension if she would refuse my travelling expenses? Now, then, you understand why I had to postpone our writing, as I said at the beginning, and I am sure you will approve it. I have told you how to keep up my dignity and all you have to do is to push the thing as fast as you can. I'll not be napping here; do you keep on the watch there."

This letter is one of the most important revelations of Erasmus' methods of providing for himself. Battus, his friend, had apparently held out to him a prospect of nothing less than a regular settlement at the court of the Marchioness Anna. Erasmus speaks especially of a settled life of study, with Battus as the chief attraction. But he is not going to give himself away too easily. He admits that he is at the end of his resources, but it would never do to let my Lady know this. His cue is to raise his own value in her eyes. So he delays, on the plea of important engagements; he reminds Battus that his stake in the affair is the same as his own—though one hardly sees why—and he urges him to caution lest he seem too eager in his suit. He flatters him with praise of his eloquence and with expressions of entire confidence. It is not a guileless youth whom we meet here, but a man of the world, conscious of himself to the point of morbidness, and yet willing to go pretty far along the road of sycophancy to the great.

The journey to Tournehens took place in the winter of 1497. In his account of it in a letter[33] to Mountjoy, Erasmus figures himself as the especial victim of hostile gods. He might have been Hannibal crossing the Alps, so magnificent is his language. Even the testimony of the oldest inhabitant is not omitted in proof of the terrors of the way. It is worth noticing that the gorgeous spectacle of trees encrusted with ice, the deep-drifted snow, the castle gleaming in a complete icy shroud, roused in Erasmus no sense of beauty or of grandeur. He was occupied solely with his own discomforts and describes all this as so much evidence of a malignant fate.

"We reached the princess Anna of Veere but just alive. What shall I say of the gentleness, the kindness, the liberality of this woman! I am aware that the exaggerations of fine writers are wont to be suspected, especially by those who have some skill at such things; but I beg you to believe that I exaggerate nothing;—nay rather that the truth goes beyond my skill. Nature never brought forth a being more modest, more clever, more spotless, more kindly. To put it all in one word:—her kindness to me was as far beyond my merits as the malice of that old scamp was contrary to my deserts. She, without any effort of mine, loaded me with as many kindnesses as he, after my endless kindness to him, heaped insults upon me. And Battus, dear fellow,—what shall I say of him, the simplest and most affectionate soul in the world! Now at last I really begin to hate those ingrates. To think that I should have been the slave of those monsters so long!"

We seem to have here a reference to his bête noire, the Paris persecutor, with whom Mountjoy was in some way associated.

The same tone of extreme laudation is kept up in a short and hurried letter[34] sent back to Battus from Antwerp on his way home. He has evidently been well treated, but is not yet at his ease about future favours from the lady. "I will fly back," he writes, "as soon as ever I can, if the gods permit." The remaining letters of this correspondence may belong to a later period, but will serve here to show how Erasmus continued his suit. While he is exhausting the language of flattery about his fair patron, he makes mysterious allusions to possible checks upon her liberality. She is in trouble; there are demands made upon her by unworthy persons. Finally it appears that she married someone quite below her station. The burden of Erasmus' song is that Battus ought to get ahead of these other claimants on the lady's bounty and make sure of his case before it is too late. One letter[35] shows downright ill-temper towards his dear friend, which he partly excuses on the ground of continued ill-health. Battus, it seems, had been urging him to write something, probably as an equivalent for favours to come. He replies:

"I hope to die if I ever in my life so hated to write anything as I did those trifles, nay, those Gnathonisms, which I have written for my Lady, for the Provost and for the Abbot. I know you will say this is my ill-temper; but you won't say that, Battus, if you think of my condition or if you consider how hard it is to force the mind to the writing of a great work, and how much harder yet, when it is all in a glow, to have it called off to other and trifling things. Because you haven't tried this yourself you fancy that my mind is always in perfect order, always on the alert, as yours is when you are enjoying the greatest possible leisure. Don't you understand that there is no worse burden than a mind wearied by writing, and don't you think I am doing enough here to satisfy those whose favours I enjoy? You are asking me for bales of books, but you don't help me to get the leisure which the writing of books demands. It isn't enough for you if I shall some day immortalise our friendship and the favour of my Lady by my books, but I must be writing you six hundred letters every day. It is now a year since you promised me money and meanwhile you send me nothing but hopes: 'I don't despair, I will push your case with all zeal.'—This sort of thing has been crammed into my ears too long; it makes me sick. And finally you lament the hard fortune of your mistress. You seem to me to be ailing with another's sickness. She neglects her fortune; you feel the pain! She fools and trifles with her N. and you snarl out: 'She hasn't anything to give.' Well! the only thing I see clearly is that if she gives nothing for these reasons she will never give anything, for reasons of this sort are never wanting to the great. How little it would be, with such vast wealth, fairly running to waste, to send me two hundred francs. She has plenty to keep those cowled whoremongers, those low-lived wretches,—you know whom I mean,—but she has nothing to provide leisure for a man who might write books worthy to live—if I may brag a little of myself. She gets into many a tight place, but it's her own fault, if she prefers to keep that pretty fellow rather than a grave and serious man, as becomes her age and sex. If she doesn't change her mind I foresee still greater troubles;—and yet I am not writing in anger against her, for indeed I love her as I ought, considering what she has done for me. But, come now, how can it hurt her fortune if I get two hundred francs? In seven hours she will never know it. The whole business comes to this: that we get the money out of her, if not in cash, then from her banker, so that I can draw it here at Paris. You have been writing letters and letters to her in this affair, asking, hinting, going round about; but what could be more useless? You ought to have watched your chance, gone at it carefully and then put it through boldly; now the same thing has got to be done, but too late. I hope to die, but I believe you might have carried it through as I wish, if you had only taken hold of it with more spirit. You can be a little more pushing in your friend's cause without offending my modesty.... Good-bye, my dear Battus, and take in good part what I have written, not in temper nor in a panic, but as to the man who is the very dearest of all men to me."

Another letter,[36] written from Orleans after his return from England, begins with similar references to some misunderstanding and goes on to the most barefaced of all Erasmus' begging efforts. Here occurs his first appeal for a church living, and this plainly not as a makeshift, but as the beginning of a regular speculation in livings:

"Then persuade her to look out for some church living for me so that when I come back I may have a quiet place to devote myself to my books. And not this only; give her some reason, the best you can make up for yourself, why she should promise me the first of the many livings she has. A pretty good one if not the best, and one that I can change for a better whenever it turns up. Of course I know there are many seeking for livings, but say that I am a man apart, one whom, if she compare him with all others, etc., etc.—you know your good old way of pouring out lies for your Erasmus. See to it that your Adolphus writes the same things, most seductive petitions namely, at your dictation. Keep it up until the promise of a hundred francs be fulfilled and if possible let it be handed over to your Adolphus, so that if,—which Heaven forbid!—any accident should take away the mother, I may get it from the son. Put in at the end that I have complained in my letters that I am suffering as Jerome often complains he suffered, from loss of eyesight and that I look forward to beginning to study as Jerome did with ears and tongue alone. Persuade her, with what elegant words you can, that she send me some sapphire or other gem that is good for strengthening the eyes. I would have written her myself what gems have this power, only I haven't my Pliny by me; do you find out for yourself from your medical man."

We have but one letter[37] from Erasmus to the lady of his hopes. It was written after his return from England and is an excellent illustration of the type of literature it represents. It is really an essay in classical composition, with its object, the getting of money, partly concealed under the cover of literary digression. This was probably the kind of thing which Erasmus liked to call nugæ and which he affected to consider a waste of time. He begins with a fantastic allusion to three other Annas, the sister of Dido, the mother of Samuel, and the grandmother of Jesus. These have all been sufficiently lauded by great writers. He will now proceed to add her as a worthy fourth to the list. We may spare ourselves his fulsome eulogies of the woman whom he has treated in his letters to Battus with something pretty close to contempt, and will quote only a specimen. He has shown how the great men of antiquity favoured the scholars of their day:—

"But I, thou muse of mine, would not change thee for any Mæcenas or any Cæsar. As for what I can give in return, I will strive, as far as this little talent and this manly strength of mine may go, that future ages shall know my Mæcenas and shall marvel that one woman at the ends of the earth strove to revive by her benevolence the cause of letters corrupted by the ignorance of the unskilled, cast down by the fault of princes, neglected through the indolence of men; that she would not suffer the labours of Erasmus, deserted by splendid promise-makers, despoiled by a tyrant, buffeted by all the blows of fortune, to fall away into poverty. Go on then, as thou hast begun. My writings, thy foster-children, stretch forth suppliant hands to thee and beseech thee by the fortune which thou spurnest when favourable and bearest bravely when hostile, by their own ever hostile fates, against which they stand by thy favour alone, and by the love of that excellent queen—I mean the ancient Theology—whom the divine Psalmist (as Jerome interprets) says stood at the right hand of God, not in foul rags as she is now seen in the fooleries of the sophists, but in golden vestments, girt with varied colours, to whose recovery from the mould all my vigils are devoted."

Then he becomes more explicit: two things he must have,—the trip to Italy and the doctor's degree, both of them really follies; he says:

"for it is quite true, as Horace tells us, that no one changes his intellect by running over the sea, and the shadow of a big word will not make one a hair's breadth more learned; but one must fit one's conduct to the times as they are and nowadays, I will not say the vulgar, but even those who are at the very top of learning, think no one can be truly a learned man unless he is called "magister noster," though Christ himself, the prince of theologians, forbids it. In former times no one was called "doctus" because he had bought the title of Doctor, but they were called Doctors who by putting forth books had given evident witness of their learning."

A very apt and pretty comment on the doctor-fabrication of our own day and land.

He concludes with certain definite statements as to the work he has in hand, which show that in spite of all his complaints he was going steadily on with his studies and with his production as well. They show further that he was perfectly sincere in his declarations that he needed money in order that he might do a kind of work from which he could hope for little pecuniary profit excepting in the form of payment for dedications. The Veere episode throughout is full of mysteries. We have no means whatever of knowing how long it went on, how often, or for how long periods, Erasmus was a guest at Tournehens, nor how much help he actually received from his noble patroness. The only date which clearly connects this correspondence with other events is a reference in the letter to the Marchioness to the anniversary of his departure from England, and that is, on other accounts, extremely uncertain. We may safely guess, however, that this connection covers several years just before and just after 1500. Battus died in 1502 and by that time the Lady Anna had contracted a marriage "plusquam servile." The letter[38] which tells these facts was written the same year at Louvain, whither Erasmus says he had fled from the plague. He complains that he has little chance of earning anything there and yet says he had declined an offer of a place to teach made to him by the magistrates. "I am wholly devoted to the study of Greek and have not been playing with my work; for I have got along so well that I can write fairly in Greek whatever I wish to say, and that ex tempore."

CHAPTER III
FIRST VISIT TO ENGLAND
1498-1500

Mr. Seebohm, in his amiable study of the Oxford Reformers,[39] is inclined to find the motive of Erasmus' first visit to England in his desire to pursue his studies, and especially that of Greek, under circumstances more favourable than he could find elsewhere; but connecting this visit with his earlier experiences and especially recalling the struggle for maintenance in which he was just then engaged, we can hardly fail to find at least suggestions of other motives. That his visit did, in fact, powerfully influence his study and his thought there can be little doubt.

The immediate occasion of the journey, which we may safely place in the summer or autumn of 1498, was an invitation of young Lord Mountjoy. Of all the English youths whom Erasmus had known intimately at Paris, Mountjoy was the favourite. He seems to have been sincerely attached to his teacher and to have done his part in making easier for him the rugged path of pure scholarship. Writing from England to Robert Fisher, another of these young men, who was then in Italy, Erasmus says[40]:

"You would have seen me there, too, long since had not Lord Mountjoy, even as I was girded for the journey, carried me off to his own England. For whither would I not follow a youth so cultivated, so gentle, so amiable? I would follow him, so help me God! to the infernal regions."

The English trip must be regarded in a way as a substitute for the Italian. He was "girded" for Italy in every way but one. He could not find the money, and he took this chance of living on that English generosity of which he had made so successful trial at Paris. Nor was he in any way disappointed. During the year and a half, perhaps, of his first visit he was entertained by one and another of the patrons of English learning, or by some of the English scholars themselves—for scholarship in England was taking on that character which it has ever since maintained, of being joined with wealth and station. This was a type of scholarship so far unfamiliar to Erasmus and it made its due impression upon him. He liked everything in England. He writes to Fisher:

"You will ask me how I like your England. Well, if you ever believed me in anything, my dear Robert, I pray you believe me in this, that nothing has ever pleased me so much. I have found here a climate pleasant and healthful, and such cultivation and learning, not of the hair-splitting and trivial sort, but profound, exact and classic, both in Latin and in Greek, that now I feel no great longing for Italy, except for what is to be seen there. When I hear my friend Colet I seem to be listening to Plato's self. Who does not marvel at the complete mastery of the sciences in Grocyn? Was ever anything keener, more profound or more acute than the judgment of Linacre? Has Nature ever made a more gentle, a sweeter or a happier disposition than Thomas More's?"

There is a touch of sincerity about these expressions, in spite of their conventional form, which is borne out by the whole future relation of Erasmus to the English group of scholars. For the first time in his life he forgets to grumble and has no occasion to beg.

In England, too, Erasmus found himself, for the first time, in relations with men who he had to confess were his superiors in many ways. We know nothing of the circumstances of Erasmus' arrival, but it seems that Mountjoy soon sent him on to Oxford and that he was received there in a college of Augustinian Canons known as the College of St. Mary. So far as any place could be called his English headquarters, this was it. The prior of the college, Richard Charnock, was far from being the kind of person Erasmus became so fond of representing as the natural head of a monastic establishment. He was a cultivated gentleman and sound scholar after Erasmus' own heart and in the friendliest relations with the most "advanced" of the early English humanistic scholars. On just what terms Erasmus lived at St. Mary's is not quite clear. He refers often to the Prior's "hospitality," but we find him asking Mountjoy to send him "his money" (pecunias meas) at once that he might repay Charnock his many obligations. Erasmus was very careful in his use of all the parts of speech except adjectives, and this phrase seems to indicate on the one hand that he was a boarder at the college, and on the other that he had some regular understanding with Mountjoy as to a supply of money.

Through prior Charnock, probably, Erasmus was introduced to the leading scholars of the University. Among these by far the most interesting to him was John Colet, a young man of just his own age, who was living at Oxford as a private or independent teacher. He was a man of admirable character, of rare acuteness of mind, already well out of the fogs of mediæval scholasticism which were still clinging around Erasmus. Colet seems at once to have impressed himself upon the visitor as a new type. He was, first of all, a man of fine culture, the son of a Lord Mayor of London, reared in ease and plenty and given from the outset that wider outlook into the world of thought which Erasmus was just beginning to get for himself. He had enjoyed the great advantage of the Italian journey with all that it implied by the way. He was a theologian, but as far as possible removed from the quality which had made the very name of theology hateful in Erasmus' ears. At Paris, as he continually complains, theology still meant the futile struggle of hair-splitting schools of a pseudo-philosophy to explain the how and the why of Christian truth. For the truth itself they seemed to have little comprehension and little care. New light was coming into theology, as into all science, through the larger and freer dealing with ancient learning; but how to connect this learning of antiquity with the present problems of religion and of life—that was the all-important question to every serious mind.

That the very clever mind of Erasmus was already fixed on serious things there can be no doubt. He was thirty years old; he had largely overcome the mechanical difficulties of the scholar's work. He had read the vast mass of the Latin classic authors with great diligence and with profound personal interest. He had had his fling as well as his trials at Paris. If he had aimed to be merely a classicist he was well fitted to join the great army of those flippant scoffers who had already brought discredit upon learning by failing to give it a serious and a modern content. Learning, divorced from life, was already beginning to lose its hold upon many circles of European interest. Every such failure was only another argument given to the surviving mediæval methods why men should not desert them until something better had been found.

And if Erasmus was fitted by his training to imitate the gay and brilliant shallowness of the Italian Humanists, he was perhaps still more drawn their way by the natural cast of his mind. He liked bright things and bright people. He was fond of ease and comfort. His interests were largely bounded by his own personality. He loved praise and could not endure reproach. He demanded friendship, but would not be bound by any ties that threatened his own convenience. His vanity called for continual food, and he often provided it by protestations of modesty which called forth devoted expressions from his admirers. The impression of his quality at this time is not a lovely one, and yet he was plainly more attractive in person than he is to us in his correspondence. He made friends and, on the whole, considering his motto, "to love as if thou wert some day to hate and hate as if thou wert some day to love," he kept them remarkably well.

The English visit was a critical time to Erasmus. His mood in the months just before had been one of discouragement, just the mood which might well have turned a man of his tastes and apparent character into a life of brilliant literary flippancy. A glimpse into his own reflections on this point is given in the letter[41] to Mountjoy above quoted, written from Oxford:

"I am getting on here splendidly and better every day. I can't tell you how delighted I am with your England, partly through custom which softens all hard things, partly through the kindness of Colet and Prior Charnock; for there was never anything more gentle, sweeter or more lovable than their characters. With two such friends I could live in farthest Scythia. What Horace wrote, that even the common people see the truth sometimes, experience has taught me:—you know his well-worn saying that things which begin the worst are wont to have the best ending. What was ever more inauspicious than my coming here?—and now everything goes better from day to day. I have cast away all that depression from which you used to see me suffering. For the rest, I beseech you, my pride, as formerly, when my courage failed, you supported me with your own, so now, though mine is not lacking, let not yours desert me."

Erasmus in England found his better self awakening to renewed courage and exertion. Even before he came over, he had begun to see that perhaps a solution of his life-problem might be found in a deliberate rejection of the mediæval method in theology by throwing it all away and going straight back, first to the original documents of Christianity themselves, and then to the early commentators on Christianity who had expounded these documents under the direct influence of the classic culture. Jerome, especially, seemed to him worthy of the most careful study and of a new and scientific edition. This was the "great work" to which he refers in his correspondence with Battus as being interrupted by Battus's trivial demands for some show-pieces to please their patroness.

Underneath all his thought there lay continually this purpose to apply his learning to making clearer the ways of God to man. The Oxford friends were eminently men to strengthen his intention, and we may feel sure that here was the real source of Erasmus' higher content in England. Let us try to make acquaintance with them through Erasmus' own words; and first with Colet, beginning at the point of their first meeting. In a long letter bearing date 1519, just twenty years later, and written under the first shock of Colet's death, Erasmus gives a short but feeling sketch of his friend's life. This sketch[42] forms the basis of all subsequent treatment of Colet.

"On his return from Italy he chose to leave his home and go to Oxford, and there publicly, and without pay, he expounded all the epistles of Paul. There I began his acquaintance, sent thither by some divine leading. He was then about thirty years old, two or three months younger than I. He had never taken nor tried for a degree in theology and yet there was no doctor in the place, either of theology or of law, and no abbot or person of any rank whatever, who did not go to hear him and even take his note-book along,—a credit alike to the learning of Colet and to the interest of those hearers, that old men were not ashamed to learn of a younger one and doctors from one who was not a doctor. The doctor title was voluntarily offered him afterward and he accepted it rather to please his friends than because he really cared for it.

"From this sacred task he was called to London by the favour of King Henry VII. and made Dean of St. Paul's, president of his congregation, whose writings he so dearly loved. This is the highest dignity in England, though there be others with more ample revenue. This man, as if called to the labour, rather than to the dignity of the office, restored the decayed discipline of his congregation and, a novelty in that place, undertook to preach on every holy day in his own church, besides the extraordinary sermons which he delivered in the royal chapel and in various other places. In his preaching he did not take his subject by fragments from the Gospels or the apostolic letters, but he proposed some one topic and carried it out to the end in successive discourses: as for example the Gospel of Matthew, the Creed, the Lord's Prayer. He preached to crowded audiences in which were generally to be found the foremost men of the city and of the royal court.

"The Dean's table, which had formerly under the name of hospitality degenerated into luxury, he brought within frugal limits."

The occasion of eating was improved by learned and serious conversation.

"He delighted especially in friendly discussions, which he often prolonged until late into the night, but all his discourse was of learning or of Christ. He often asked me to walk with him and then he was as gay as anyone, but ever a book was the companion of our walk and our discourse was still of Christ. He was impatient of all uncleanness and could not bear to hear language ungrammatical and defiled with barbarisms. All his household furniture, his dress, his books, he wished to have perfectly nice, but did not strive for show. He wore only sad-coloured garments, whereas priests and theologians there are generally clad in purple. His outer dress was always of plain woollen, lined with fur in winter. The whole income of his see he gave over to his agent to be spent in household matters and gave away his own ample income for pious purposes."

Then follows an account of the endowment by Colet of the famous St. Paul's school, to which he gave the best energies of his later years.

"While everyone approved this work, many wondered at his building a splendid house on the grounds of the Carthusian monastery near the king's palace at Richmond. He used to say that he was preparing a retreat for his old age when he should be unequal to his work or broken by disease. It was his intention to live there the philosopher's life with two or three choice friends, among whom he used to count me, but his death came too soon."

The careful analysis of Colet's character which concludes this sketch is quite different from Erasmus' usual undiscriminating praise of what suited himself. He presents Colet to us as an eminently human personage, inclined by nature to all the joys of earthly life, and yet subduing all lower temptations by the force of his unconquerable will. He was a man of strongly marked individual opinions, yet so careful of the feelings of others that he avoided discussion excepting among friends or when it was forced upon him. At such times, however, he spoke as one compelled by an inner impulse of which he was no longer master. In the first interview of which we have any record, at a dinner at St. Mary's, in Oxford, a discussion arose on the very speculative question of the meaning of the story of Cain's sacrifice. Erasmus and an unknown theologian took sides against Colet[43]:

"'Not Hercules himself can prevail against two' say the Greeks, but he alone conquered us all. He seemed to be intoxicated with a sacred frenzy and to utter things more lofty and more noble than belong to men. His voice took on another sound, his eyes a different expression, his face and figure were changed; he seemed to grow larger, and at times to be inspired with a something divine."

So in this later, more careful account Erasmus refers to Colet's view of Thomas Aquinas. He himself, it appears, had come to have some respect for Aquinas and had made various attempts to draw out Colet on the subject. He had so far failed, but one day, returning again to the charge, he found Colet's eyes fixed upon him,

"as if watching whether I were in jest or in earnest. But when he saw that I was speaking from my heart, he cried out, as if inspired by some spirit:—'Don't speak to me of the man! If he had not been a most arrogant creature he would not have defined all things with such boldness and with such haughtiness. If he had not had something of the spirit of this world, he would not so have corrupted the whole teaching of Christ with his profane philosophy.'"

The result was that Erasmus looked more carefully into his Aquinas and greatly revised his judgment of him.

Remembering that this sketch of Colet was written two or three years after Luther had nailed his Theses on the church door at Wittenberg, we may gain from it a good insight into the views not only of Colet, but of Erasmus as well, upon many of the doubtful questions of the early Reformation days. Nowhere, perhaps, in Erasmus' writings do we find more temperate and cautious suggestions. Already we may discern in clear outline the determining motives of his position in the great struggle. In his pet abhorrence, the monastic system, Colet went with him to the point of free criticism of faithless and irreligious monks, but, like Erasmus himself when he was, so to speak, in the witness-box, he had nothing to say against the monastic life in itself. He had little to do with monks and gave them nothing at his death, but he professed great affection for the life of seclusion and often declared that he would enter it himself

"if he could find anywhere an order really devoted to apostolic living. When I was setting out for Italy, he commissioned me to inquire on this point, saying that he had heard that in Italy there were some monks really sensible and pious. For he did not follow the vulgar opinion which calls that 'religion' which is sometimes only weakness of intellect. He used to say that he nowhere found greater virtue than among married people, since they were restrained from falling into many vices by their natural affections, by the care of children and by their household duties.

"On this account he was more charitable towards the fleshly sins of the clergy. He used to say that he hated pride and avarice in a priest more than if he kept a hundred concubines. Not indeed that he thought incontinence in priest or monk was a trifling fault, but that the other vices seemed to him farther removed from true piety. There was no kind of person more hateful to him than those bishops who acted more like wolves than like shepherds, commending themselves to the crowd by their sacred offices, their ceremonies, their benedictions and indulgences when really they were heart and soul devoted to this world, to glory and to greed.

"From Dionysius and the other early Fathers he had learned certain things which he did not so far adopt as ever to go against the laws of the church, but yet far enough to make him less opposed to those who did not approve the worship everywhere in the churches of images painted or in wood, stone, bronze, gold and silver. He had the same feeling toward those who doubted whether a priest openly and plainly wicked could properly perform the sacraments;—not by any means that he favoured their error! but in wrath against those who by a life openly and every way corrupt gave ground for such suspicions. The numerous colleges, founded in England at vast expense, he used to say only stood in the way of good learning and were nothing but so many enticements to laziness. Nor did he have a very high opinion of the Universities where the all-corrupting ambition and greed of the professors destroyed the integrity of all science.

"While he strongly approved the auricular confession, saying that nothing gave him such comfort and good feeling, yet he as strongly condemned its too anxious and frequent repetition. While it is the custom in England for priests to celebrate mass almost every day, he was content to do so on Sundays and holidays and very rarely on other occasions.... Yet he by no means condemned the practice of those who go daily to the Lord's table. Although he was himself a most learned man, yet he disapproved of that painful and laborious learning which, gathered from a knowledge of all branches and the reading of all authors, is as it were lugged in by every handle. He always said that in this way the native soundness and simplicity of the mind were worn away and men were made less sane and less adapted to the innocence and to the pure affection of Christianity. He greatly admired the apostolic letters, but so reverenced the wonderful majesty of Christ that compared with this the writings of the apostles seemed to become as it were defiled.... There are countless things accepted to-day in the universities from which he greatly differed and which he used to discuss at times with his intimate friends. With others, however, he concealed his views for fear of two evils, first, that he would make the matter worse, and second, that he would ruin his own reputation. There was no book so heretical that he would not read it carefully, saying that he often got more profit from it than from the books of those who make such fine definitions and often come to worship the leaders of their school and sometimes even themselves."

In this affectionate, but at the same time discriminating, review of Colet's life and character we may easily see outlined certain ideals of Erasmus himself. He admires in his friend a quality of discretion, which, under some circumstances, might come pretty near to duplicity. On many matters he had two opinions, one for himself and his intimate friends, and another for the public. That is a condition of mind that will do very well so long as the great issues of a dispute are not brought out into sharp relief. In the times that try men's souls, when events will no longer bear nice distinctions, but demand that men shall stand up and be counted—yes or no—on the question of the hour, then this quality of discretion may be the ruin of a man. It was toward precisely such a crisis that the affairs of the Christian Church were rapidly tending when Erasmus learned to know John Colet in the delightful intercourse of the college at Oxford. Colet had the good fortune to die (in 1519) before the supreme test came to him. Erasmus was to spend the best energy of his declining years in the struggle to live up to the difficult standard of having one opinion for himself and another for the world.

In the several subjects touched upon in the review of Colet's opinions we hear plainly the echoes of discussions, growing ever more intense, upon the secondary issues of the Reformation. Colet approved of monks, of secret confession, of an elaborate ceremonial, of a priesthood resting upon divine consecration, and he would not for the world question the validity of recognised church law. Yet he was ready to deal fearless blows at faithless monks, at a superstitious repetition of confession, an overdoing of the ceremonies of worship, and the worldliness of the parish clergy. He approved of all learning, but he condemned the application of learning to a fruitless definition-making.

The first letter we have from Colet to Erasmus is an address of welcome to England, a graceful little note, as full of flattery as any of Erasmus' own and of interest to us chiefly as showing that the visitor had not come to England unknown. He had, it is true, written nothing of consequence, but Colet had seen some little things of his at Paris, and Erasmus' acquaintance there with young Englishmen of high social rank could hardly fail to have carried at least his name across the Channel. The same impression of a reputation already grounded is embodied in the well-known story of Erasmus' first meeting with another Englishman, with whom his relations, at least by correspondence, were to be still more intimate,—Thomas More. The incident is told in the life of More by his great-grandson as follows[44]:

"it is reported how that he, who conducted him in his passage, procured that Sir Thomas More and he should first meet together in London at the Lord Mayor's table, neither of them knowing each other. And in the dinner-time, they chanced to fall into argument, Erasmus still endeavouring to defend the worser part; but he was so sharply set upon and opposed by Sir Thomas More, that perceiving that he was now to argue with a readier wit than ever he had before met withal, he broke forth into these words, not without some choler:—'Aut tu es Morus aut nullus.' Whereto Sir Thomas readily replied, 'Aut tu es Erasmus aut diabolus,' because at that time he was strangely disguised, and had sought to defend impious positions...."

This story plainly implies a considerable degree of reputation for both persons concerned, but as More was at most twenty years old and known only as a very bright young student at the time of Erasmus' arrival, we are compelled either to give up the story or to place it some years later and suppose that Erasmus did not meet More at all during his first visit. This latter supposition, however, is quite impossible, since Erasmus speaks plainly of More at this time as among his most valued friends. The author indeed prefaces the anecdote with the statement that the two scholars had long known and loved each other and that their affection "increased so much that he [Erasmus] took a journey of purpose into England to see and enjoy his personal acquaintance and more entire familiarity,"—most of which lacks support in known facts.[45] We can only accept so much of it as implies previous acquaintance by correspondence, and that may well have taken place while Erasmus was at Oxford and More in London working with as much zeal as he could command at his preparation for the bar. If we strip off the decorations and suppose the meeting to have occurred during some visit of Erasmus in London from Oxford, this very pretty story is not altogether improbable. At all events it strikes the key-note of a friendship which was to last as long as life. The disparity in age (eleven years) was more than made up by the great activity and originality of More's mind and the singular charm of his engaging personality. During this first visit to England we have no specific record of Erasmus' relations with More, except this one anecdote of the dinner and another of a visit paid by the two friends to the children of King Henry VII. at the royal villa of Eltham, near Greenwich. Erasmus' account of this visit, given many years afterward,[46] is an explanation of how he came to write an ode to the young prince. He was dragged into it, he says, by Thomas More, who came to him while he was staying at Lord Mountjoy's in Greenwich and invited him to take a walk for pleasure into the neighbouring village.

"There all the royal children were being educated, with the exception of Arthur the eldest.... In the centre stood Henry, a boy of nine, but already with a certain regal bearing, that is a loftiness of mind joined with a singular courtesy of demeanour. At his right was Margaret, then about eleven, who afterward married James, king of Scotland. At his left Mary, a child of four, was playing, and Edmund, a babe, was carried in his nurse's arms. More and his friend Arnold, having paid their respects to the lad Henry, under whose reign Britain now rejoices, offered him some writing—I know not what. I, expecting nothing of this sort and having nothing to offer, promised that I would prove my devotion to him in some way and at some time or other. Meanwhile I was vexed with More, because he had given me no warning and especially because the youth sent me a note at dinner, challenging my pen. I went home, and though the muses, from whom I had long been divorced, were hostile to me, I produced an ode in three days. Thus I avenged the affront and patched up my chagrin. It was a task of only three days and yet a task, for it was several years since I had read or written any poetry."

This rather silly tale is of interest only as giving the first hint of any connection of Erasmus with the English royal family, a connection not wholly without influence on his future. If More was playing a joke on his friend, as has been generally assumed, it was certainly a very poor one. Other indications of Erasmus' occupations in England are found in a famous letter to his former teacher in Paris, Faustus Andrelinus. It is a merry letter to a merry fellow and must not be taken too seriously.[47]

"I, too, in England have gone ahead not a little. That Erasmus whom you used to know is almost a good hunter, a horseman not the worst, and no slouch of a courtier; he knows how to salute more gracefully and smile more sweetly and all this with Minerva against him. How are my affairs? Well enough. If you are a wise man you will fly over here too. Why should a man with a nose like yours grow old in that Gallic dung-heap? But then your gout—bad luck to it, saving your presence!—keeps you away. And yet if you knew the delights of Britain, Faustus, you would hurry over here with winged feet, and if your gout wouldn't let you, you'd pray to be turned into a Daedalus. Why, just to mention one thing out of many: the girls here have divine faces; they are gentle and easy-mannered. You'd like them better than your Muses. Besides, there is a fashion here which can't be praised enough. Wherever you go everyone kisses you, and when you leave you are dismissed with kisses; you come back, the sweets are returned. Someone comes to see you—your health in kisses! he says good-bye—kisses again! You meet a person anywhere,—kisses galore!—so wherever you go everything is filled with these sweets. If you, Faustus, should just once taste how delicious, how fragrant they are, you would long to travel in England, not like Solon, for ten years only, but to the end of your days. The rest we will laugh over together, for I hope to see you very soon."

Two other Englishmen, both his seniors by some years, became friends of Erasmus during this first visit,—William Grocyn and Thomas Linacre. Grocyn was primarily a scholar and teacher, versed especially in Greek. Linacre was a physician of the highest repute in his day, and identified with the whole future of medical science in England through his foundation of the London College of Physicians. Both had studied in Italy and there had put themselves under the influence of the leading personages in the later humanistic generation. Both had become skilled in Greek learning, and were doing their parts, each in his own way, to further the advancement of Greek study in England. Grocyn was probably teaching Greek at Oxford when Erasmus came thither, and so far as he ever acknowledged obligations to any teacher, the younger man admits the great profit he derived from this riper talent. In regard to Linacre he notes especially a severe and painful accuracy which was, probably, the reason why he left so little behind to attest his scholarship. He could not satisfy his own exacting standards. With both these men Erasmus seems to have lived on terms of affectionate intimacy. There are indications that they were at times rather tired of his persistent begging, but this did not interfere with their friendly interest, which ended only with their lives.

Delighted as he plainly was with everything and everybody in England, better treated than he had ever been in his life, why did not Erasmus take his own advice and settle down there in some regular occupation? So cosmopolitan a genius as his could hardly have dreaded a change of residence; the scholar's home was wherever the sun shone, and certainly never was man more free to follow the bent of his own wishes than was Erasmus. That the idea was not a strange one to him is clear from many indications. Especially was it forced upon him by a suggestion from Colet that he might stay on at Oxford and join him in what seemed then likely to be his life-work of expounding the fundamental documents of Christianity upon the "new" basis of science and common sense. What Colet's arguments were on this point we can only guess from a reply of Erasmus, but they seem to have been such as would come naturally from one scholar to another in whom he thought he recognised a spirit kindred to his own. Colet lived in that new world of thought which was the old, and saw before him the mission of clearing away the mediæval rubbish that had piled up in the long interval between the really old theology of the Greek Fathers and the new thought of his own times. And here he seemed to have found the man of all others best fitted to help him—young, learned in the language and filled with the spirit of the ancients, free from all ties of family or home and, apparently, deeply serious in his interest in religious things. Colet had had a test of his quality in several active discussions on points of theology, which had brought out at once his learning and his desire for truth even at the sacrifice of his own less well-considered opinions. Erasmus had shown a docility in revising his judgments in very marked contrast to his firmness when dealing with other opponents. The difference was, that in facing Colet he found an opponent who was using his own weapons with equal skill and even greater courage. In the letter of Erasmus declining to remain at Oxford we hear nothing of the question of ways and means. It is impossible that it should not have been in his mind, but there is every reason to suppose that it did not influence his decision. The only trustworthy patron he had yet found was an Englishman; there was a chance of a university appointment, and, failing this, the prospect of private pupils was better in England than anywhere else. We are told ad nauseam of a considerable money loss which he suffered on leaving England. So that we are sure almost beyond a doubt that his reasons for declining what must have been a very tempting proposition were somehow connected with his larger scholarly ambitions.[48]Of course he makes as much as possible of his own modesty: Colet "is (to quote Plautus) asking water of a rock." How should he have the face to teach what he has never learned; how warm the frost of others when he himself was all of a shiver with fear? He praises Colet for his courage and zeal in the cause of the "ancient" theology as against the "new-fangled race of theologians, who spend their lives in mere arguments and sophistical quibbling." Not that he altogether condemns these studies, for he approves of every kind of study,

"but taken by themselves, with no admixture of more refined and ancient letters, they seem to make a man a conceited and disputatious fellow—whether they can ever make him a wise man, let others decide. For they seem to exhaust the mind with a kind of crude and barren subtlety; there is no sap in them, nor any real breath of life.

"I am not speaking against learned and approved professors of theology, for I look up to them with the greatest respect, but against that mean and haughty herd of theologians who think all the writings of all authors are worth nothing compared to themselves. When you, Colet, went into the fight against this unassailable horde that, so far as in you lay, you might restore that ancient and pure theology, now overgrown with their thorns, to its early splendour and dignity, you took upon yourself, so help me God!—a task in many ways most admirable, most loyal to the name of Theology itself, most wholesome for all studious men and especially for this blooming University of Oxford—but, I don't conceal it, a task full of difficulty and of opposition. Yet you will overcome the difficulty with your learning and your industry, and your great soul can afford to overlook the opposition. There are, too, among those theologians not a few who are both willing and able to help such honest efforts as yours. Nay, there is no one who would not join hands with you, since there is not a doctor in this famous school who has not listened most attentively to your lectures on St. Paul, now going on for the third year....

"I am not wondering that you should take upon your shoulders a burden to which you may be equal, but that you call me, a man of no account whatever, to share in so great an enterprise. For you ask me—nay you urge upon me, that as you are lecturing upon Paul so I, by expounding the ancient Moses or the eloquent Isaiah, should strive to rekindle the studies of this school—chilled, as you say, by these long months of winter."

He goes on to protest his unfitness for the task and especially to defend himself against the charge that he had given Colet reason to believe he might accept his suggestion.

"Nor did I come hither to teach poetry or rhetoric, which have ceased to be agreeable to me since they ceased to be necessary. I refuse the one, because it does not accord with my plans, the other because it is beyond my powers. You blame me wrongly in the one case, my dear Colet, because I have never had before me the profession of so-called secular literature, and you urge me in vain to the other, because I know that I am unequal to it. Besides, if I were never so fit, I could not do it, for I must soon go back to my deserted Paris."

We seem to find here a suggestion that Colet had laid before him two propositions,—one that he might become a teacher of the classic literature in which he was already a master; the other that he should join with himself in setting the meaning of Scripture free from the absurd trammels which the scholastic methods of interpretation had laid upon it. Either of these tasks, with a reasonable prospect of support and the delightful intercourse of academic life, would, one must suppose, have been a supreme attraction for Erasmus. The only possible explanation of his refusal is his dread of putting his neck into any yoke whatever, no matter how easy it might be. A possible suggestion of this motive is found in the somewhat enigmatic sentence that "poetry and rhetoric had ceased to interest him since they had ceased to be necessary." This may have meant that literature in itself was important to him only as a means of livelihood, and since he was, at least temporarily, provided for, he did not care to teach it at Oxford. Literature was henceforth to be a means to the higher end of redeeming theology, the regina disciplinarum, the "queen of sciences," from her present degradation. But for this latter work he was not as yet prepared. If we ask why he did not choose to continue his preparation under the very favourable conditions at Oxford, we may perhaps find a partial answer in his deep-seated dislike of the work of teaching. He could talk beautifully about it, but it seems pretty clear that he always hated it. So Oxford lost a professor, but the world gained a man.