Proof. It is not prohibited by any law, divine, human, or
natural: divine, because it is not forbidden in Scripture;
human, because there is no law against it as there is against
hazard or dicing; natural, because it is not excluded as (_a_)
coming by good fortune, (_b_) provoking others to sin, (_c_)
vain and useless.
_a_ and _b_ are proved by premiss 1 and 4. _c_ is proved
because we are supposing that the lottery is undertaken in
order that the city of Bruges may make a profit with which to
pay off some of its municipal debt, or be lightened of some of
its common burdens, so that its citizens may be free to
journey whither they please. (That this last refers among other
things to pilgrimage, may be inferred from a reference to the
Canon Law on the undertaking of journeys, chapter on Sacred
Churches.)
2. The lottery is not prohibited by the human laws forbidding
hazard and dice.
Proof. The laws prohibiting these do not forbid the lottery,
nor can it be included under them by parity of reasoning. For
hazard is not forbidden because it depends on chance, or else
all gaming would be forbidden; and it is not forbidden to play
for small stakes or on the occasion of a party. But it (hazard)
is forbidden because, as Petrus de Palude says in book 4,
distinction 15, question 3, article 5, the person who loses is
wont to blaspheme; and also because men are tempted to lose
more than they can afford.'
We need not follow the argument in detail, but the fourth proposition
is interesting, 'That there is an injustice in the lotteries as
practised by some cities, in that the creditors of the city are
compelled against their will to take part in the lottery, and so
probably make a loss, for fear of not recovering the money owed to
them'. After six propositions come two contrary arguments, which are
refuted by five and two considerations; and then there is a brief
summing up.
Excellent reasoning this doubtless was, and the student who could
dispute over these intricacies for hours together, must have had at
least a competent knowledge of Latin, understanded of the examiners;
but it is not surprising that the humanists desired something better.
The universities did not live upon the teaching of the colleges alone.
Scholars came from abroad and competed with the home-bred talent to
supply such private tuition as was required, and when their ability
had been proved, received licence from the university to teach
publicly. The advantage generally rested with the new-comer. _Omne
ignotum pro mirifico._ When there was so much to learn, so much
novelty that the stranger might bring with him, it was little wonder
that a new arrival aroused excitement, especially if he came with a
reputation. Teachers travelled from one university to another in
search of employment, and any one with a knowledge of Greek or Hebrew
was sure to find pupils and attentive audiences. So great was the
enthusiasm on both sides, that lectures often lasted for hours.
Aleander, when he returned from Orleans to Paris in 1511, kept quiet
for a month, in order to awaken public interest. Then he announced a
course of lectures on Ausonius, to begin on 30 July. His device was
entirely successful. Two thousand people gathered, and he was obliged
to lead them over from his own college, de la Marche, to a larger
building, known as the Portico of Cambray. He had composed an
elaborate oration of twenty-four pages. 'It took me two hours and a
half to deliver,' he says, 'and would have taken four, if I hadn't
been a quick reader; but no one showed the least sign of fatigue, in
spite of the heat. My voice lasted very well. Next day I had nearly as
good an audience, although it was the day for the disputation at the
Sorbonne. On the day after, all seats were taken by 11, though I do
not begin till 1.' His success was not mere imagination. One who was
present tells us that men looked upon him as if he had come down from
heaven, and shouted 'Viuat, viuat', as they were accustomed to do to
Faustus Andrelinus, another witty Italian who was then lecturing in
Paris. A lecturer to-day who went on into the third hour would
scarcely be so popular.
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 advertisement. 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 gratitude 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 nobility, 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 God, 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. Manuscripts
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 manuscript
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 classical, 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
manuscripts 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 manuscript of the Gospels
known, from its present habitation in the Leicester town-library, as
the Leicester Codex; its date being variously assigned 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 manuscripts 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 manuscript 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 manuscripts were written and from
what originals is not plain--the Suidas perhaps from a manuscript
belonging at one time to Grosseteste; but the classical manuscripts
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 manuscripts in England at this time was
John Serbopoulos, also of Constantinople, who between 1489 and 1500
wrote a number of Greek manuscripts at Reading: two copies of Gaza's
Grammar, Isocrates _ad Demonicum_ 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
manuscripts 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
manuscripts. 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 classics, 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
Halicarnassus; 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
ambassador; 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 classical, 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 manuscripts (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 circumstances, 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 noble? 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 God 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 butter spread thick, and Erasmus' was
the best butter. 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