The Age of Erasmus Part 6

But Aleander was not alone in his powers of speech, and others besides Parisians could listen. Butzbach tells us, not without humour, of a certain Baldwin Bessel of Haarlem, a learned physician with a wonderful memory, who was summoned to Laach to heal their Abbot, who lay sick. On one occasion at Coblenz he harangued an audience of 300 for three hours on end on the power of eloquence, and stimulated by the sight of such a gathering, worked himself up in his peroration, until he believed himself to be a second Cicero. His hearers perhaps did not agree. Anyway, Butzbach is the only person who mentions him, and he would have preferred a little less eloquence and a little more medicine; for the Abbot, instead of recovering, died under the hands of the new Cicero in two days.

Besides lecturing at the university, young men also maintained themselves by working for the printers, correcting proof-sheets and composing complimentary prefaces and verses. Another service which they could render to both printers and authors was to give public 'interpretations', as they were called, of new books on publication, for the purpose of advertis.e.m.e.nt. These interpretations probably took place at the printer's office, and were of the nature of a review, describing the book's contents; and they were doubtless repeated at frequent intervals before new groups of likely purchasers.

Erasmus, however, had been sent to Paris to take a degree in Theology, and his patrons expected him to occupy himself with this. When he returned from Holland in 1496 he could not face again the rigours of Montaigu, and so he took shelter in a boarding-house kept by a termagant woman--'pessima mulier' the bursar of the German nation, her landlords, called her when she would not pay her rent--, the wife of a minor court official. So long as his supplies lasted, he kept strictly to his work; but when the Bishop failed him, he was obliged to support himself, and took to private teaching. Two of his pupils were young men from Lubeck, who were under the care of a teacher from their own part of the world, Augustine Vincent, a budding scholar, who afterwards published an edition of Virgil, but who as yet was glad to be helped by Erasmus. Another pair came from England, one a kinsman of John Fisher, and were in the charge of a morose North-countryman.

In great poverty, Erasmus made his way somehow, occasionally writing little treatises for his pupils, on a method of study, on letter-writing--an important art in those days--, a paraphrase of the _Elegantiae_ of Valla; and finally, one of his best-known works, the Colloquies, had its origin in a little composition of this period, which he refers to as 'sermones quosdam quotidianos quibus in congressibus et conuiuiis vtimur'--a few formulas of address and expressions of polite sentiments, which develop into brief conversations.

The poor scholar's hardships were mitigated by the generosity of a friend. Whilst with the Bishop of Cambray Erasmus had made the acquaintance of a young man from Bergen-op-Zoom, the Bishop's ancestral home; one James Batt, who after education in Paris had returned to be master of the public school in his native town. About 1498 Batt was engaged as private tutor to the son of Anne of Borsselen, widow of an Admiral of Flanders and hereditary Lady of Veere, an important sea-port town in Walcheren which then did much trade with Scotland, and whose great, dumb cathedral and ornate town-hall still tell to the handful of houses round them the story of former greatness. From the first Batt applied himself to win his patroness' favour to his clever and needy friend. Erasmus was invited to visit them, money was sent for his journey; and within a short time he was receiving pecuniary contributions from the Lady more frequently than if she had been allowing him a pension. His letters to Batt--the replies which came he never published--are remarkable reading, and do credit to both sides. Conscious of high powers and pressed by urgent need, Erasmus begins by begging without concealment, for money to keep him going and give him leisure. But as time goes on and the Lady wearies of much giving, Erasmus' tone grows sharper and more insistent; until at last he scolds and upbraids his patient correspondent for not extorting more, and even bids him put his own needs in the background until Erasmus' are satisfied. Batt's name deserves to be remembered as chief amongst faithful friends, for putting up with such scant grat.i.tude after his inexhaustible devotion; and we must needs think more highly of Erasmus, if his friend could accept such treatment at his hand and not be wounded. To the great much littleness may be forgiven. The surprising thing is that Erasmus should have allowed such letters to be published.

In the summer of 1499 Erasmus was carried off to England by another friend whom he had captivated, the young Lord Mountjoy, who had come abroad to study until the child-bride whom he had already married should be old enough to become his wife. After a summer spent among bright-eyed English ladies at a country-house in Hertfordshire, then studded with the hunting-boxes of the n.o.bility, and a visit to London which brought him into quick friendship with More, ten or eleven years his junior, Erasmus persuaded his patron to take him for a while to Oxford. Mountjoy promised but could not perform. The Earl of Warwick was to be tried in Westminster Hall, and Mountjoy as a peer must be in his place. So Erasmus rode in to Oxford, over Shotover and across Milham ford, alone.

As an Austin canon he had a claim on St. Mary's, a college which had been established in 1435 at the instance of a number of Augustinian abbots and priors, for the purpose of bringing young canons to Oxford to profit by the life and studies of the university; in much the same way that Mansfield and Manchester Colleges have joined us in recent years. For two or three months he was here, enjoying the society of the learned and attending Colet's lectures on the Epistles of St.

Paul; invited to dine in college halls, as a congenial visitor is to-day, and spending the afternoons, not the evenings, in discussions arising out of the conversation over the dinner-table. His ready wit and natural vivacity, his wide reading and serious purpose, made themselves felt. Even Colet the austere was delighted with him and begged him to stay. He was lecturing himself on St. Paul; let Erasmus take some part of the Old Testament and expound it to fascinated audiences. Oxford laid her spell upon the young Dutch canon--upon whom does she not?--but he was not yet ready. To give his life to sacred studies was the purpose that was riveting itself upon him; but he could not accomplish what he wished without Greek at the least--he never made any serious attempt to learn Hebrew--and Greek was not to be had in Oxford, hardly indeed anywhere in Western Europe outside Italy and perhaps Spain. Indeed, for some years to come this university was to display her characteristic, or may be her admirable, caution towards the new light offered to her from without.

We must bear in mind the well-reasoned hostility of the Church to--or at least hesitation about--the revival of learning. In the period we are considering the powers of evil were very real. Men instinctively accepted the existence of a kingdom of darkness, extending its borders over the sphere of knowledge as over the other sides of human activity. Greek was the language of some of the most licentious literature--Sappho's poems were burnt by the Church at Constantinople in 1073--and of many detestable heresies; and thus though the Council of Vienne, with missionary zeal, had recommended in 1311 that lectures in Greek--as in other languages of the heretical East--should be established in the universities of Paris, Bologna, Oxford, and Salamanca, the decree had not been carried out, and Greek was still regarded with suspicion by the orthodox. Their opposition dies with their lives, these guardians of the thing that is. Of the thing that cometh they know, that 'if it be of G.o.d, they cannot overthrow it'.

The silent flooding in of the main is to them more to be desired than the swift wave which in giving may destroy. Let us not think too lightly of them because they feared shadows which the light of time has dispelled. It needs no eyes to see where they were wrong: where they were right--and they were right often enough--can only be seen by taking trouble to inquire.

Of the condition of learning in England in the second half of the fifteenth century we do not yet know all that we might. Ma.n.u.scripts that men bought or had written for them, books that they read, catalogues of libraries now scattered can tell us much, even though the owners are dead and speak not. Single facts, like cards for cardhouses, will not stand alone. There is still much to be done.

Great libraries are only just beginning to gather up the ma.n.u.script minutiae which their books contain; to identify handwritings; to decipher monograms; to collect facts. But some day when the work has been done, we may well hope to be able to put bone to bone and breathe new life into them in a way which will make valuable contributions to our knowledge.

There is sometimes an inclination now to underestimate the effect of the Renaissance. The writers of that age were unsparingly contemptuous of their predecessors, and their verdict was for long accepted almost without question. The reaction against this has led to an undue extolling of the Middle Ages. It is true enough that many of the Schoolmen, though the humanists speak of them as hopelessly barbarous, were capable of writing Latin which, if not strictly cla.s.sical, had yet an excellence of its own. But in view of the extracts given above from Ebrardus and John Garland it can hardly be maintained that there was much knowledge of Greek in Western Europe before the Renaissance.

England was not ahead of France and Germany in the fifteenth century; and if Deventer school in 1475 was fed upon the monstrosities we have seen, it is not likely that Winchester and Eton had any better fare.

Some sporadic examples there may have been of men who added a knowledge of the Greek character to their reminiscences of the _Graecismus_; just as at the present day it is not difficult to acquire a faint acquaintance with Oriental languages, enough to recognize the formation of words and plough out the letters, without any real knowledge. Colet and Fisher only began to learn Greek in their old age. One, the son of a Lord Mayor of London, made a name for himself as a lecturer at Oxford, and was advanced to be Dean of St.

Paul's; the other, as head of a house at Cambridge and Chancellor of the University, promoted the foundation of the Lady Margaret's two colleges, Christ's and St. John's, which were to bring in the spirit of the Renaissance. It is impossible to suppose that men of such position would have spent the greater part of their lives without Greek, if there had been any facilities for them to learn it when they were young. Nor again would Erasmus, when teaching Greek at Cambridge in 1511, have chosen the grammars of Gaza and Chrysoloras to lecture upon, if his audience had been capable of anything better. Eminent scholars do not teach the elements at a university if boys are already learning them at school.

The condition of things may fairly be gauged by Duke Humfrey's collections for his library at Oxford. Of 130 books which he presented to the University in 1439, not one is Greek; of 135 given in 1443, only one--a vocabulary--is certainly Greek, four more are possibly, but not probably so. A little later in the century four Oxford men were pupils of Guarino in Ferrara; Grey (d. 1478) brought back ma.n.u.scripts to Balliol and became Bishop of Ely; Gunthorpe (d. 1498) took his books with him to his deanery at Wells; but to only two of the four is any definite knowledge of Greek credited--Fleming (d.

1483), who compiled a Greek-Latin dictionary, and Free (d. 1465), who translated into Latin Synesius' treatise on baldness.

A discovery recently made by Dr. James of Cambridge has thrown unexpected light on the history of English scholarship at this period; and as it affords an example of the fruits to be yielded by careful research and synthesis, it may be detailed here. New Testament scholars have long been interested in a ma.n.u.script of the Gospels known, from its present habitation in the Leicester town-library, as the Leicester Codex; its date being variously a.s.signed to the fourteenth or fifteenth century. In the handwriting there are some marked characteristics which make it easy to recognize; and in course of time other Greek ma.n.u.scripts were discovered written by the same hand, two Psalters in Cambridge libraries, a Plato and Aristotle in the cathedral library at Durham, a Psalter and part of the lexicon of Suidas in Corpus at Oxford. But no clue was forthcoming as to their origin, until Dr. James found at Leiden a small Greek ma.n.u.script in the same hand, containing some letters of Aeschines and Plato, and a colophon stating that it had been written by Emmanuel of Constantinople for George Neville, Archbishop of York, and completed on 30 Dec. 1468. Where the various ma.n.u.scripts were written and from what originals is not plain--the Suidas perhaps from a ma.n.u.script belonging at one time to Grosseteste; but the cla.s.sical ma.n.u.scripts were probably done for Neville in England during the prosperous years before his deportation to Calais in 1472, the Psalters and Gospels probably after that date at Cambridge; for the Paston Letters show that some of his disbanded household made their way to Cambridge, and Dr. Rendel Harris has ingeniously demonstrated that one Psalter and the Gospels were in fact at Cambridge with the Franciscans early in the sixteenth century. The presence of a Greek scribe in England about 1470 is an important fact.

Neville was released from prison through the intervention of Pope Sixtus IV, who about 1475 sent to England another Greek scribe and diplomatist, George Hermonymus of Sparta, charged with a letter to Edward IV. Besides Andronicus Contoblacas at Basle, Hermonymus was at the time the only Greek in Northern Europe who was prepared to teach his native tongue; in consequence most of the humanists of the day, Reuchlin, Erasmus, Budaeus and many others, turned to him for instruction, though he was indeed a poor teacher. He secured the Archbishop's release, and therewith a handsome reward to himself; but lingering on, he found himself compelled to spend about a year in London--in prison: some Italian merchants having trumped up against him a charge of espionage, from which he only escaped by paying the uttermost farthing. That he suffered such a disagreeable experience perhaps indicates that no one in London was much interested in him or his language.

Another Greek who was copying ma.n.u.scripts in England at this time was John Serbopoulos, also of Constantinople, who between 1489 and 1500 wrote a number of Greek ma.n.u.scripts at Reading: two copies of Gaza's Grammar, Isocrates _ad Demonic.u.m_ and _ad Nicoclem_, several commentators on Aristotle's Ethics, Chrysostom on St. Matthew, a Psalter and the completion of the Corpus Suidas which his fellow-countryman Emmanuel had begun. In one of his colophons (1494) he specifies Reading Abbey as his place of abode; for the others he merely says Reading. Possibly he was in the abbey the whole time; but even a temporary visit, during which he wrote Gaza and Isocrates, is an indication that one at least of the monastic houses was not hostile to the revival of learning.

Not that any doubt is possible on this point, since the researches of Abbot Gasquet into the life of William Selling, who was Prior of Christchurch, Canterbury, 1472-95. After entering the monastery, about 1448, Selling was sent to finish his studies at Canterbury College, the home of the Benedictines in Oxford.[20] In 1464 he was allowed to go with a companion, William Hadley, to Italy; where they spent two or three years over taking degrees in Theology, and heard lectures at Padua, Bologna, and Rome. Twice in later years Selling went to Italy again; and he brought back with him to England ma.n.u.scripts of Homer and Euripides, and Livy, and Cicero's _de Republica_. Some of these have survived and are to be found in Cambridge libraries; others perished in the fire which broke out when Henry VIII's Visitors came to Canterbury to dissolve Christchurch. But Selling's interest in learning was not confined to the collection of ma.n.u.scripts. A translation of a sermon of Chrysostom made by him in 1488 is extant; and an antiquarian visitor to Canterbury copied into his note-book 'certain Greek terminations, as taught by Dr. Sellinge of Christchurch'.

[20] The Canterbury gate of Christ Church, Oxford, still marks its site. A generation or so later Linacre and More were students there; both having a connexion with Canterbury.

Another Churchman of this period who was interested in the revival of learning has recently been revealed to us by his books, John Shirwood, Bishop of Durham, 1483-93. He was an adherent of Neville whom we mentioned as the patron of Emmanuel of Constantinople; and having risen to prosperity as Neville rose, he did not desert his patron when Fortune's wheel went round. It does not appear that he was educated in Italy; but for a number of years he was in Rome, as a lawyer engaged in the Papal court; and to his good service there as King's proctor he probably owed his advancement to Durham. Whilst at Rome, he bought great numbers of the Latin cla.s.sics, especially those which were coming fresh from the press of Sweynheym and Pannartz. Cicero seems to have held the first place in his affections, six volumes out of forty-two; the Orations, the Epistles, _de Finibus_ and _de Oratore_, the two last being duplicated. History is well represented with Livy, Suetonius, Josephus, Plutarch, Polybius, and Dionysius of Halicarna.s.sus; the last four in translations. In poetry he had Plautus and Terence, Horace, Martial, Juvenal, Seneca, and Statius; in archaeology Vitruvius and Frontinus; of the Fathers, Jerome, Lactantius, and the Confessions of Augustine.

Twice after becoming Bishop Shirwood went to Rome again, as amba.s.sador; once in 1487 in company with Selling and Linacre: on the second occasion, in 1492-3, he died. His books, however, had already found their way home to Durham, where they were acquired by Foxe, Shirwood's successor in the see; and Foxe subsequently presented them to his newly-founded college of Corpus Christi in Oxford. It is interesting to contrast Shirwood's collection with books presented to the library of Durham monastery by John Auckland, who was Prior 1484-94. Not a single one of them is cla.s.sical, not one printed; Aquinas, Bernard, Anselm, Grosseteste, Albertus Magnus, Chrysostom in Latin, Vincent de Beauvais, _Summa Bibliorum, Tractatus de scaccario moralis iuxta mores hominum, Exempla de animalibus_. The Prior's outlook was very different from the Bishop's.

Leland tells us that Shirwood had also a number of Greek books, which Tunstall found at Auckland in 1530; but only one of these has been traced, a copy of Gaza's Grammar written by John Rhosus of Crete in 1479, and bought by Shirwood at Rome. Where the rest are no one knows; doubtless scattered in many libraries, among people to whom the name of Shirwood has no meaning. One wonders why Foxe did not secure them for Corpus when he took the Latin books. He wanted Greek, but perhaps he considered the set of Aldus' Greek texts which he actually gave to Corpus, more worth having than Shirwood's ma.n.u.scripts (for when Shirwood was collecting in Italy, the first book printed in Greek, the Florentine Homer, 1488, had not yet appeared): possibly he never saw them.

Time would fail us to tell of all the famous Englishmen who went to study in Italy in the last years of the fifteenth century, let alone those who went and did not win fame. Langton who became Bishop of Winchester, and, not content with Wykeham's foundation, started a school in his own palace at Wolvesey; Grocin, Linacre and William Latimer, who took part in Aldus' Greek Aristotle; Colet; Lily who went further afield, to Rhodes and Jerusalem; Tunstall and Stokesley and Pace--all these were Oxford men, and yet few of them returned to settle in Oxford and teach. Of their later lives much is known, though not so much as we could wish; but their connexion with this University cannot be precisely dated, because the university registers for just this period, 1471-1505, are missing. We cannot tell just when they graduated; and we miss the chance of contemporary notes added occasionally to names of distinction. We cannot even discover to what colleges they belonged.

In the last half of the fifteenth century there had been a beginning of Greek in Oxford. Thomas Chandler, Warden of New College, 1454-75, had some knowledge of it; and under his auspices an Italian adventurer of no merit, Cornelio Vitelli, came and taught here for a short time.

For about two years, 1491-3, Grocin returned to lecture on Greek, as the result of his Italian studies. Colet was here about 1497-1505, until he became Dean of St. Paul's; but his lectures, as we have said, were on the Vulgate, not the Greek Testament. Of the rest that shadowy and fugitive scholar, William Latimer, was the only one of this band of Oxonians who definitely came back to live and work in the University; and he perhaps did not cast in his lot here until 1513.

When he did return, he was not to be torn away again from his rooms at All Souls, under the shadow of St. Mary's tower. In 1516 More and Erasmus wished him to come and teach Greek to Fisher, Bishop of Rochester; but could not prevail with him. It would seem strange to-day for an Oxford scholar to be invited to become private tutor to the Chancellor of the sister University: he would probably shrink, as Latimer did, and find refuge in excuses. For eight or nine years, Latimer said, his studies had led him elsewhere, and he had not touched Latin and Greek. For the same reason he declared himself unable to help Erasmus in preparing for the second edition of his New Testament. What these studies were is nowhere told--Latimer's only printed work is two letters, one a mere note to Aldus, the other a long letter to Erasmus--but there is some reason to suppose that they were musical. He urged, too, that it was useless to hope the Bishop could make much progress in a month or two with such a language as Greek, over which Grocin had spent two years in Italy, and Linacre, Latimer, and Erasmus himself had laboured for many years: it would be much better to send to Italy for some one who could reside for a long time in the Bishop's household.

Though he remained faithful to Oxford, Latimer in his later years held two livings near Chipping Campden: in one, Weston-sub-Edge, he rebuilt his parsonage-house and left his initials W.L. in the stonework, in the other, Saintbury, there is a contemporary medallion of him in the East window, showing the tall, thin figure which George Lily describes.

At the time of Erasmus' first visit to England, 1499, London was far more a centre of the new intellectual life than either Oxford or Cambridge. He rejoiced in his first meeting with Colet, and in their walks in Oxford gardens in the soft October sunshine; his Prior at St.

Mary's was benign and helpful; and he found a young compatriot, John Sixtin, of Bolsward in East Friesland, studying law, and engaged with him in a contest of that arid elegance which the taste of the age still demanded. But in London he found Grocin at his City living, ready to lend him books, and perhaps already contemplating those lectures delivered two years later, on the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy of Dionysius, which brought him to such a surprising conclusion--a denial of the attribution of them to Dionysius the Areopagite, which in agreement with Colet he had set out to prove. In London was Linacre, just returned from Venice, full of Aldus' Greek Aristotle; to a supplementary volume of which he had sent a translation of Proclus'

Sphere, a mathematical work then highly esteemed. He had been working on Aristotelian commentators, and was soon to lecture on the _Meteorologica_--a course which More, who was working for the Bar in London, attended. More himself not long afterwards lectured publicly in London on Augustine's _de Ciuitate Dei_, also a favourite work with the humanists. William Lily, returned from his pilgrimage, was at work perhaps already as a schoolmaster in London; and vying with More in translating the Greek Anthology into Latin elegiacs. Bernard Andreas, the blind poet of Toulouse, after trying his fortune in vain at Oxford, had insinuated himself into Henry VII's confidence, and was now attached to the court as tutor to Prince Arthur--an office from which Linacre attempted unsuccessfully to oust him--and busy with his history of the king's reign: a project which enjoyed royal favour, and was the forerunner of Polydore Vergil's creditable essay towards a critical history of England.

When Erasmus was again invited to England in 1505-6, the position had not changed. He writes to a friend in Holland: 'There are in London five or six men who are thorough masters of both Latin and Greek: even in Italy I doubt that you would find their equals. Without wishing to boast, it is a great pleasure to find that they think well of me.' To Colet in the following year, when he had said farewell, he writes from Paris: 'No place in the world has given me such friends as your City of London: so true, so learned, so generous, so distinguished, so unselfish, so numerous.' With the string of epithets we are not concerned: the point to remark is that it is of London he writes, not of either of the universities.

Under these circ.u.mstances, it is not surprising that Erasmus did not at once accept Colet's proposition in 1499 that he should stay and teach in Oxford. Whether provision was offered him or not, we do not know: he might perhaps have stayed on by right at St. Mary's, but he loved not the rule. We do know, however, that at Paris there certainly was no provision for him. In quest of Greek, in quest of the proper equipment for his life's work, he went back to the old precarious existence, pupils and starvation, the dependence and the flattery that he loathed. It is this last, indeed, that puts the sting into his correspondence with Batt. That loyal friend, ever coaxing money out of his complacent and generous patroness for dispatch to Paris, would now and then ask for a letter to her, to make the claims of the absent more vivid. At this Erasmus would boil over: 'Letters,' he writes, 'it's always letters. You seem to think I am made of adamant: or perhaps that I have nothing else to do.' 'There is nothing I detest more than these sycophantic epistles.' Well he might; for this is the sort of thing he wrote.

You will remember that the Lady of Veere was named Anne of Borsselen.

A letter of Erasmus to her begins: 'Three Annas were known to the ancients; the sister of Dido, whom the Muses of the Romans have consecrated to immortality; the wife of Elkanah, with whose praises Jewish records resound; and the mother of the Virgin, who is the object of Christian worship. Would that my poor talents might avail, that posterity may know of your piety and snow-white purity, and count you the fourth member of this glorious band! It was no mere chance that conferred upon you this name, making your likeness to them complete. Were they n.o.ble? So are you. Did they excel in piety? Yours, too, redounds to heaven. Were they steadfast in affliction? Alas that here, too, you are constrained to resemble them. Yet in my sorrow comfort comes from this thought, that G.o.d sends suffering to bring strength. Affliction it was that made the courage of Hercules, of Aeneas, of Ulysses shine forth, that proved the patience of Job.'

This, of course, is only a brief epitome. After a great deal more in this strain, he concludes: 'I send you a poem to St. Anne and some prayers to address to the Virgin. She is ever ready to hear the prayers of virgins, and you I count not a widow, but a virgin. That when only a child you consented to marry, was mere deference to the bidding of your parents and the future of your race; and your wedded life was a model of patience. That now, when still no more than a girl, you repel so many suitors is further proof of your maiden heart.

If, as I confidently presage, you persevere in this high course, I shall count you not amongst the virgins of Scripture innumerable, not amongst the eighty concubines of Solomon, but, with (I am sure) the approval of Jerome, among the fifty queens.'

The taste of that age liked the b.u.t.ter spread thick, and Erasmus' was the best b.u.t.ter. He relieved his mind the same day in a letter to Batt--which he did not shrink from publishing in the same volume with his effusion to the Lady Anne: 'It is now a year since the money was promised, and yet all you can say is, "I don't despair," "I will do my best." I have heard that from you so often that it quite makes me sick. The minx! She neglects her property to dally and flirt with her fine gentleman' (a young man whom Erasmus feared she would marry, as in fact she did, shortly afterwards). 'She has plenty of money to give to those scoundrels in hoods, but nothing for me, who can write books which will make her famous.' _In ira veritas._ But for Erasmus--and Batt--the rather simpering statue of Anne on the front of the town-hall at Veere would have little meaning for us to-day.

We must not judge Erasmus too hardly in his double tongue. Scholars of to-day, secure in their endowments, can hold their heads high; of their obligations to pious Founders no utterance is required save _coram Deo_--'vt nos his donis ad Tuam gloriam recte vtentes'. We hear much now of the artistic temperament which brooks no control, which at all costs must express its message to the world. No artist has ever burned with a fiercer fire than did Erasmus for the high tasks which his powers demanded of him; but at this period of his life there was no pious Founder to make his way plain. Later on, in all time of his wealth, he was generosity itself with his money, and inexorable in refusing honours and places that would have hindered him from his work.

V

ERASMUS' LIFE-WORK

In August 1511 Erasmus returned to Cambridge. He was a different man from the young scholar who had determined twelve years before that it was no use for him to stay in Oxford. In the interval he had learnt what he wanted--Greek; he had had his desire and visited Italy; and now he came back to sit down to steady work, in accordance with his promise to Colet, in accordance with the purpose of his life, to advance the study of the Scriptures and the knowledge of G.o.d. It had been no light matter to learn Greek. Books were not abundant, and the only teacher to be had, Hermonymus of Sparta, was useless to him, neither could nor would impart the cla.s.sical Greek that scholars wanted. So Erasmus was compelled to fall back on the best of all methods, to teach himself. He had no Liddell and Scott, no Stepha.n.u.s; probably nothing better than a ma.n.u.script vocabulary copied from some earlier scholar, and amplified by himself. No wonder that he found Homer difficult and skipped over Lucian's long words. He exercised himself in translation, from Lucian, from Libanius, from Euripides.

But that ready method of acquiring a new language--through the New Testament, was probably not open to him, for copies of the Gospels in Greek were rare, and not within the reach of a needy scholar's purse.

However, he persevered, and at length he was satisfied. He never attained to Budaeus' mastery of Greek, but he had acquired a working knowledge which carried him as far as he wished to go.

His visit to Italy need not detain us long. Twenty-five years later he wrote to an Italian n.o.bleman with whom he was engaged in controversy, to say that Italy had taught him nothing. 'When I came to Italy, I knew more Greek and Latin than I do now.' In the excitement of contention he perhaps 'remembered with advantages', for in Italy he had one great opportunity. He had published in 1500 at Paris a chrematistic work ent.i.tled _Collectanea Adagiorum_, a collection of Latin proverbs with brief explanations designed to be useful to the numerous public who aspired to write Latin with elegance. After the book was out, as authors do, he went on collecting, and on his way to Italy in 1506, he published a slightly enlarged edition, also in Paris. In Italy he made acquaintance with Aldus, and after finishing his year of superintendence over the pupils he had brought with him, he went, about the beginning of 1508, to dwell in the Neacademia at Venice. In September 1508 there appeared from Aldus' press a Volume on the same subject, but very different in bulk; no longer _Collectanea Adagiorum_, but _Adagiorum Chiliades_. The Paris volume, a thin quarto, had contained about 800 proverbs, Aldus' had more than 3,000, and the commentary became so amplified, with occasional lengthy disquisitions on subjects moral and political, that nothing but a folio size would accommodate it.

Where this work was done, Erasmus does not specifically state. One pa.s.sage gives the impression that he had made his new collections in England; but as one reason for his dissatisfaction with the first edition was the absence of citations from the Greek, it seems more probable that he really wrote the new book in Aldus' house at Venice.

There, surrounded by the scholars of the New Academy, Egnatius, Carteromachus, Aleander, Urban of Belluno, besides Aldus himself and his father-in-law Asula.n.u.s, having at hand all the wealth of the Aldine Greek editions and the Greek ma.n.u.scripts which were sent from far and near to be printed, Erasmus was thoroughly equipped to transform his quarto into folio, his hundreds into thousands. He tells us that the compositors printed as he wrote, and that he had hard work to keep pace with them. Some of his rough ma.n.u.scripts--written rapidly in his smooth hand and flowing sentences--survive still to help us picture the scene. It is remarkable how little correction there is.

Here and there a whole page is drawn straight through, to be rewritten, or a pa.s.sage is inserted in the neat margin; but there is little botching, little mending of words or transposing of phrases, such as make the rough work of other humanists difficult reading. As he wished the sentences to run, so they flowed on to his pages, and so they actually were printed.

The importance of Erasmus' time in Italy is, then, that he completed, or at any rate published, the enlarged _Adagia_, his first considerable work, a book which carried his name far and wide throughout Europe, and won him fame amongst all who had pretensions to scholarship. No one reads it to-day. Except the composition of the schools, for which Erasmus is considered uncla.s.sical, there is little Latin writing now; but in its youth the book had a great vogue, and went through hundreds of reprints.

This second visit of Erasmus to Cambridge was under pleasant conditions. Fisher was interested in his work, and having been until recently President of Queens'--the foundation of Margaret of Anjou, which Elizabeth Woodville had succoured, York coming to the rescue of Lancaster--he was able without difficulty to secure rooms in college for his protege. High up they are, at the head of a stair-case, where undergraduates still cherish his name, and where his portrait--an heirloom from one generation to another--may be seen surrounded by prints of gentlemen in pink riding to hounds; quite a suitable collocation for this very humanly minded scholar. Besides his own work he lectured publicly for a few months. He began to teach Greek, and lectured on the grammar of Chrysoloras. Finding that this did not attract pupils, he changed to Gaza; which he evidently expected to be more popular. But he did not persevere. If his position was public (which is doubtful), there was no money to pay him for long; and it is a sign of the state of the University, that he found it no use to lecture on anything more advanced than grammar. The Schoolmen were still strongly entrenched.

Besides teaching Greek he also lectured on Jerome's Letters and his Apology against Ruffinus, books which, as we shall see, he was working at privately. He is said to have held for a time the professorship of Divinity founded in Cambridge, as in Oxford, in 1497 by the Lady Margaret, but the records are inadequate; and here too it is possible that his teaching was a private venture. He had no regular income except a pension from Lord Mountjoy, to which in 1512 Warham added the living of Aldington in Kent; and these were supplemented by occasional gifts from friends, which he courted by dedicating to them translations from Plutarch and Lucian, Chrysostom and Basil. But this was not enough. He was free in his tastes, and liked to be free in his spending. He needed a horse to ride, and a boy to attend upon him. In consequence we hear a good many complaints of penury, all through his three years at Cambridge, 1511 to 1514.

It is worth while to examine in detail the work that he completed during this period on the Letters of Jerome and the New Testament. One afternoon in Oxford in 1499 he had had a long discussion with Colet, and in the course of it had argued strongly against a point of view which Colet had derived from Jerome. Whether this set him on to read Jerome again--he was already quite familiar with him--is not clear; but a year later, when he was hard at work in Paris, he was already engaged upon correcting the text of Jerome, and adding a commentary, being specially interested in the Letters. So far did his admiration carry him that he writes to a friend, 'I am perhaps biased; but when I compare Cicero's style with Jerome's, I seem to feel something lacking in the prince of eloquence himself'. After he left Paris in 1501, we hear no more of Jerome till 1511. It may therefore fairly be argued that his early work was done on ma.n.u.scripts found in Paris libraries, very likely those of the great abbeys of St. Victor or St.

Germain-des-Pres.

Subsequently, in Cambridge, he again had access to ma.n.u.scripts and completed his recension of the Letters. Robert Aldridge, a young Fellow of King's, afterwards Bishop of Carlisle, speaks of working with him at Jerome in Queens', probably helping him in collation. An early catalogue of the Queens' library does not contain any mention of Jerome, so that Erasmus had probably borrowed his ma.n.u.scripts from elsewhere--perhaps, like those of the New Testament, from the Chapter Library at St. Paul's; for later on, when the book was in the press, he returned from Basle to England to consult the ma.n.u.scripts again, and there is no reason to suppose that during his brief stay--not a full month--he went outside London. If this surmise were correct, the destruction of St. Paul's library in the fires of 1561 and 1666 would explain why so little has been discovered about the ma.n.u.scripts which Erasmus had for his Jerome. He himself, in his prefaces, gives little indication of them, beyond saying that they were very old and mutilated, and that some of them were written in Lombardic and Gothic characters. Perhaps some day a student of Jerome will arise who will be able to throw light on the matter from examination of the text at which Erasmus arrived.

To the New Testament--the other work which occupied his time at Cambridge--he had also turned his attention shortly after his return to Paris in 1500, beginning a commentary on the Epistles of St. Paul.

At the first start he wrote four volumes of it, but then for some reason threw it aside, and never completed it, though his mind recurred to it at intervals; and on one occasion after a fall from his horse, in which he injured his spine, he vowed to St. Paul that he would finish it, if he recovered. Probably he felt that his vow was redeemed by his Paraphrases of the New Testament, which he wrote a few years later, beginning with St. Paul, and completing the Epistles before he undertook the Gospels.