Savonarola had the satisfaction of effecting not a few conversions

among the men of letters who gathered round his pulpit. Ficinus

became his warm apologist, and after listening to his sermons

declared his intention of devoting the rest of his life to religion.

Nicholas of Schomberg and Zenobius Acciajoli abandoned the world, and

assumed the Dominican habit. Picus Mirandola sold all his estates

and distributed the price to the poor, and even Politian on his

death-bed received the habit of religion from the hand of one of

his friars. But whatever were the success gained by the preacher

among the Florentine courtiers, his eloquence was powerless over the

mind of their master. Lorenzo and Savonarola each tried to gain the

other, and each was doomed to suffer defeat. Lorenzo vainly tried to

corrupt or silence an orator who was equally indifferent to threats

or bribes; and when the prince lay on his death-bed, Savonarola, as

vainly, strove to wring from him a promise to restore her liberties

to Florence. After his death, indeed, which took place in 1492, a

brilliant triumph seemed to crown the hopes of the popular friar, and

under his leadership, Florence, having expelled the Medici, seemed

about to exchange her debased republicanism for a theocracy, and her

free life of pleasure for an almost puritanic severity of manners.

But the tide of social corruption which had for a moment been thus

forcibly dammed up, soon burst the barrier that opposed it, and swept

away all traces of the seeming reform, the reformer himself being

the first victim of its fury. Those very streets of Florence which

had witnessed the Medicean carnival shows, and where a little later

the Florentines, under the direction of their republican chief, had

made solemn acts of reparation for past license, now saw the reformer

himself borne to ignominious execution amid the howls and blasphemies

of an infuriated populace.

The expulsion of the Medici from Florence in no way checked the

progress of the classical Renaissance, which only attained its

full growth in the following generation. To the age of Lorenzo the

Magnificent succeeded that of his son Pope Leo X., under whose

princely rule Rome drew to herself the literary throngs who had

before illuminated the Tuscan court, and rejoiced in the questionable

glories of a second Augustan age. But of Rome and her Pontiffs, her

garish splendour and her true reform, we shall speak in another

chapter. Before doing so we must first look across the Alps, and see

what has been going on in the world of letters in the colder climate

of the North.

_CHAPTER XXI._

DEVENTER, LOUVAIN, AND ALCALA.

A.D. 1360 TO 1517.

It is not to be supposed that the development which had been taken

by the universities, and which we have been engaged in tracing in

the foregoing chapters, the perils to which their younger members

were exposed, and the yet graver results that might be expected to

ensue to faith and morals if their influence continued without some

salutary check, could fail, even in their own day, of attracting the

attention of thoughtful men; and much curious illustration might be

drawn from the literature of the fourteenth century, tending to show

how questionable a place the great academies of learning at that

time held in popular estimation. The most racy legends of mediæval

_diablerie_ generally introduce us to some student of Paris or

Salamanca, who has made a compact with the enemy of souls; while the

graver histories of the saints are crowded with examples of those who

fled into the cloister to escape the contagion of the schools.

The danger to which the scholastic convertites seem to have been most

sensitively alive was not one, perhaps, which, to modern notions,

would seem the most appalling. It was not the licentious manners, nor

even precisely the heterodox opinions of the schools, which chiefly

terrified them, but the subtle perils of intellectual vanity. It

has been before remarked that, among the old monastic scholars, the

existence of this danger was hardly recognised. The obligations of

their state for the most part protected them from its attacks. “What

they learnt without guile they communicated without envy,”[312]

and they believed and practically set forth the doctrine which,

as one of modern times has beautifully expressed it, acknowledges

“humility, the basis of morals, to be also the foundation of reason.”

So entirely did the rules of holy living purge the pursuit of

science from the leaven of pride, that it is quite common to find

ancient writers speaking of learning as though it were almost a

virtue. Things had sadly changed in this respect since the close of

the tenth century, and the warnings which St. Bernard addressed to

the scholars of his day had to be repeated by the ascetics of each

successive age with ever-increasing earnestness. He sorrowfully

lamented that those who pursued learning were daily more and more

losing sight of its right _order_, its right _motive_, and its right

_end_. The order of true knowledge, he said, is to set in the first

rank the things that concern salvation; its motive should be charity,

and its end, neither curiosity nor vain-glory, but our own or our

neighbour’s edification. And he failed not to remind the would-be

philosophers whom he addressed, and whose chief object seemed to be

to make themselves talked about, that the “biting tooth” of the Latin

satirist had long before drawn their portraits, and ridiculed those

who only care to know in order that somebody else may know that they

know.[313] The evils he complained of had certainly not abated with

time; nevertheless, the old Christian morality, which was so based on

intellectual lowliness as to be hardly capable of realising a fear of

the opposite vice until it arose before the eye in all its deformity,

was too deeply rooted in Christendom to be eradicated by one or two

generations of professors; and its influence may be traced in the

horror which good men felt and expressed for what they regarded as a

more radical poison than the grosser temptations of an undisciplined

life. And we who have witnessed the later issues of that great Revolt

of Reason which took its beginnings in the pride of intellect, and

which will find its end in the reign of Antichrist, are bound to bear

witness that they judged aright, and to applaud a sagacity which

originated less perhaps in any very quick-sighted intelligence than

in the undulled instincts of the Christian sense.

When, therefore, we represent to ourselves the learned world of the

Middle Ages crowding to the universities that were starting up in

almost every provincial capital of France, Germany, Italy, and Spain,

we must not forget that a quiet undercurrent was always flowing in

an opposite direction, though it had no power to overcome the strong

full tide of fashion. Thus, the life of the Blessed Peter Jeremias,

of the Order of Preachers, presents us with the picture of the

student of Bologna about to read for his doctor’s degree, when, one

night as he sits at his books, the window of his room is dashed in,

and the voice of one of his fellow-students, recently departed,

warns him in terrible accents to renounce those academic honours, in

the greedy pursuit of which he had lost his immortal soul. Peter,

pierced to the soul by this voice from beyond the grave, abandons

his intention of reading for honours, and presents himself the next

morning at the gates of the Dominican Convent to implore admission

among the friars. And it was to another conversion of this sort,

somewhat less pictorial in its colouring, that we owe the foundation

of a very remarkable religious institute, too closely associated with

the history of education to be left unnoticed here.

Somewhere about the year 1360 there appeared at Paris a young Flemish

student named Gerard, a native of the town of Deventer, whose success

in every branch of study acquired him no mean fame in academic

circles, and inflated him with a corresponding degree of vanity. He

took his master’s degree in his eighteenth year, received several

rich benefices, began a very pompous and expensive way of life, and

at last removed to Cologne, less to study than to display and enjoy

himself. There, however, he found his fate awaiting him. It was

the precise period when a great spiritual reaction was going on in

Rhenish Germany: not twenty years before Cologne had witnessed the

conversion of the celebrated John Tauler, whose pride of learning

had yielded to the simple word of a nameless unlettered layman,

and who spent the rest of his life in preaching those doctrines of

self-abnegation on which he built the edifice of the spiritual life.

Ruysbroek, the greatest contemplative of his time, was still living

in the Green Valley of the forest of Soignies, and training many a

fervid soul in the mystic science which aimed at uniting man to God

by utterly separating him from creatures. It was probably one of

these disciples of Ruysbroek, a religious solitary, whose name, like

that of Tauler’s “layman,” has not been preserved, who determined to

undertake the conversion of the gay young canon, in whom, despite his

vanity and his love of the world, he detected the promise of more

excellent things.

The biographer of Gerard has told the story of his conversion briefly

enough, and compressed the arguments of the orator into one brief

sentence, _Quid hic stas, vanis intentus? Alius homo fieri debes._

And another man Gerard indeed became. He flung the world behind his

back, and entered on a life of penance with no less ardour than that

with which he had applied himself awhile before to the business of

the schools. For three years he retired among the Carthusians and

wholly disappeared from the world; and when he returned there was

little of the old Gerard about him. He at once devoted himself to the

work of preaching, and generally preached twice a day, his sermons

being seldom less than three hours in length. But it was difficult

to weary a German congregation of that enthusiastic period, and no

complaints appear to have been made of Gerard’s prolixity. During his

retirement he had placed himself under the direction of Ruysbroek,

and appears to have caught much of his tone and spirit. He had made

the Scriptures his only study, and these, expounded with simple

eloquence from earnest lips, drew him crowds of hearers, “clergy

and laity, men and women, little and great, learned and unlearned,

lawyers and magistrates, bond and free, rich and poor, beggars and

pilgrims.” He laid the axe to the root of the tree, and like St.

John Baptist, called on all men to do worthy works of penance. In

short, he gave the age what it wanted, and though he met with many

contradictions, he also effected many practical reforms.

Gerard the Great, as he was called, soon reckoned a considerable

number of disciples, whom he made it his chief object to ground

in the spiritual life; and in spite of his renown as one of the

most learned doctors of his time, he thoroughly inculcated the

lesson of intellectual humility. Out of the ranks of his followers

was gradually formed a sort of fraternity or congregation; and he

had conceived the design of founding for their reception certain

monasteries under the rule of the Canons Regular, in which purpose

he was greatly encouraged by Ruysbroek. Gerard died before he was

able to put his plans into execution, but they were carried out by

his disciples, and specially by Master Florentius Radewyns, a canon

of Utrecht, a former student at the university of Prague. The new

religious assumed the title of “Brethren of the Common Life;” their

mother-house was at Deventer, they lived like monks, though without

at first taking the religious vows, and their employment was the

correction and transcription of books, which formed their principal

source of revenue. Gerard, in the rule he had drawn up for his own

guidance, had prohibited all profane studies. He desired that his

children should exclusively addict themselves to the reading of

the Scriptures and the Fathers, not wasting their time over “such

vanities as geometry, arithmetic, rhetoric, logic, grammar, lyric

poetry, and judicial astrology.” In the rigorism of these views we

detect the spirit of one who has tasted of a poisoned cup, and knows

no other security than a rule of total abstinence. He specially

forbids all gainful studies, which obscure and obliquify the human

reason, and do not tend to God; and he roundly asserts that very few

persons who follow the pursuits of law or medicine are ever found

who live a just, honest, and quiet life. No doubt his principles

were extreme, and it is some consolation to find that he admitted of

certain dispensations. The wiser of the Gentile philosophers, such as

Plato and Socrates, might, he admitted, be read with profit. Seneca

also was to be tolerated, and with an amiable inconsistency we find

him, even in his rule of life, slipping in, half unconsciously, a

quotation from Virgil.

All this was exactly what might have been expected from a converted

man of the world; but Florentius had gone through a different kind of

experience, and one which made his views less austere and exclusive.

He had passed the ordeal of a university career unscathed, and his

biographer expends an entire chapter in bringing forward proofs why

the name he bore was specially appropriate to one whose life from

childhood had been so holy and unspotted. Not only was he himself a

flower of all perfection, but he was also destined to make the houses

he governed flower-beds from which spiritual bees were to suck the

honey of wisdom; his brethren were to give out to a naughty world

the sweet odour of virtue, according to that of the Spouse in the

Canticles, “The flowers have appeared in our land.” Florentius was

the model of a good scholar, kind to his equals, respectful to his

superiors, a proficient in the liberal arts, but keeping his heart

for the Divine law, which he loved and studied far more diligently

than he did the book of the Gentiles.

Under his superiority the labours of the brethren were made to

embrace a larger sphere of usefulness, and to include the education

of youth. The prohibition against profane learning speedily

disappeared, and the schools of Deventer attained high celebrity;

and there, in 1393, a little scholar, Thomas Hammerlein by name,

was admitted under the roof of Florentius, becoming afterwards the

biographer of his revered master, and the reputed author of the

“Following of Christ.”

Not to enter into the vexed question whether he were indeed the

author, or only the transcriber, of that first of uninspired books,

it is yet satisfactory to know that the Thomas à Kempis, whom

from infancy we have been used to revere, is not reduced by the

investigations of ruthless critics to a mere mythical existence.

He really lived, wrote, taught, and prayed. In the college of

Deventer he studied grammar and plain-chant under Florentius, and

tells us how, when present in choir with his schoolfellows, he loved

stealthily to watch his master, because of his devout aspect, being

cautious, however, that his pious curiosity was not perceived,

inasmuch as the good rector could make himself feared as well as

loved. He takes us into the school, too, and shows us the master

setting copies, and praising the flexible fingers of a little

disciple, whom, with the blessing of God, he hopes to form into a

good writer. Or we enter the cell of the devout brother, Gerard of

Zutphen, whose whole consolation lay in holy books, and who was

liable to get so absorbed in the study of them, that a charitable

brother had to come and warn him when the bell had rung for dinner.

He was the librarian, and had a passing great care for his books; but

as for himself and his corporeal wants, if superiors and companions

had not seen to them better than he did himself, he would have fared

but poorly. He thought so highly of the benefits to be derived from

useful reading, that he lent his books to ecclesiastics out of doors,

to win them from idle and frivolous amusements. “Books,” he would

say, “preach better than we can do.” And therefore he held them in

great reverence, read them lovingly, and copied them with the utmost

diligence. Nor must we omit to mention the pious cook, John Ketel,

the saint of the community, as all, by common consent, seem to have

regarded him. Florentius knew his merit, and to increase it never

gave him a civil word; but his humility and sweetness were proof

against every trial. Or that devout clerk, Arnold Schoonhove, a

schoolfellow of Thomas, who never played in the streets with other

idle boys, and when he sat in school with them heeded not their

childish pranks, but steadily wrote down the master’s words on paper,

and got a chosen comrade (who was probably Thomas himself) to read

over the lesson to him, or hear him repeat it. “It was God whom he

chiefly sought in his studies,” says his friend, “and what he liked

best was to get into a quiet corner and pray.” After seven years’

study among the Brethren of Common Life, Thomas took the habit of

the Canons Regular in the monastery of St. Agnes, at Zwoll, where

he lived till his ninety-second year, engaged in useful labours,

transcribing and composing pious books, which earned for him the

sobriquet of the Hammer of Hearts. He has left us memorials of his

monastery and his college-life, written with a sweet simplicity which

reminds us of Bede. Of his own life we know but little, yet that

little has a character of its own. His world was his cell; he was

never quite happy out of it, and if sometimes induced by his brethren

to go abroad and take a little air, he would soon contrive to get

away, with the transparent excuse, that “Some one was waiting for him

in his chamber.” The others would smile, knowing well Who He was of

Whom he spoke, even the Beloved, of Whom it is written that He stands

at the door and knocks. In all the books that he transcribed he wrote

his favourite motto, “Everywhere I sought for rest, but I found it

nowhere save in a little corner, with a little book.” And a certain

old and much-defaced picture was long preserved, which represented

his effigies surrounded with the legend, which must here be added

in its original phraseology:--“In omnibus requiem quæsivi, sed non

inveni, _nisi in Hoexkins ende Boexkins_.”

In process of time the Brethren of Common Life spread over Flanders,

France, and Germany, and the schools they founded multiplied and

flourished. They were introduced into the University of Paris by

John Standonch, a doctor of the Sorbonne, who gave into their

direction the College de Montaigu, of which he was the principal,

and established them in Cambray, Valenciennes, Mechlin, and Louvain.

He drew up statutes for their use, which are supposed by Du Boulay

to have furnished St. Ignatius with the first notions of his rule,

an idea which receives some corroboration from the fact that the

saint studied at the College de Montaigu during his residence at the

University of Paris. Standonch himself received the habit of the Poor

Clerks, as they were now often called, and had the satisfaction of

seeing more than 300 good scholars issue from his schools, many of

whom undertook the direction or reform of other academies. In 1430

the Institute numbered forty-five houses, and thirty years later the

numbers were increased threefold. The Deventer brethren were far

from being mere mystics and transcribers of books. The aim of their

foundation was doubtless to supply a system of education which should

revive something of the old monastic discipline, but they cultivated

all the higher branches of learning, and their schools were among

the first of those north of the Alps which introduced the revived

study of classical literature. One of their most illustrious scholars

was Nicholas of Cusa, or Cusanus, the son of a poor fisherman, who

won his doctor’s cap at Padua, and became renowned for his Greek,

Hebrew, and mathematical learning. Eugenius IV. appointed him his

legate, and Nicholas V. created him Cardinal and Bishop of Brixen,

in the Tyrol. His personal character won him the veneration of his

people, but, according to Tennemann, his love of mathematics led him

into many theological extravagances. He was strongly inclined to the

views of the Neo-Platonists; he considered, moreover, that all human

knowledge was contained in the ideas of numbers, and attempted to

explain the mystery of the Holy Trinity on mathematical principles.

He was undoubtedly a distinguished man of science, and was the first

among moderns to revive the Pythagorean hypothesis of the motion of

the earth round the sun. Cusanus had studied at most of the great

universities, but held none of them in great esteem, for he professed

a sovereign contempt for the scholastic philosophy which still held

its ground in those academies. At his death he left his wealth to an

hospital which he had founded in his native village, and to which he

attached a magnificent library. Deventer could boast indeed of being

the fruitful mother of great scholars, such as Hegius, Langius, and

Dringeberg, all of whom afterwards took part in the restoration of

letters. The brethren, moreover, displayed extraordinary zeal in

promoting the new art of printing, and one of the earliest Flemish

presses was set up in their college. And in 1475, when Alexander

Hegius became rector of the schools, he made the first bold

experiment of printing Greek.

It is not to be supposed that such a revolution as that which was

brought about in the world of letters by the new invention could fail

of producing events of a mixed character of good and evil. Whatever

was fermenting in the minds of the people now found expression

through the press, and Hallam notices “the incredible host of popular

religious tracts poured forth” before the close of the fifteenth

century, most of them of a character hostile to the faith. The first

censorship of printed books appears to have been established in 1480,

by Berthold, Archbishop of Mentz, who explained his reasons for

taking this step in a mandate, wherein he complains of the abuse of

the “divine art” of printing, whereby perverse men have turned that

to the injury of mankind which was designed for their instruction.

Specially he alludes to those unauthorised and faulty translations

into the vulgar tongue of the Scriptures, and even the canons of the

Church, wherein men of no learning or experience have taken on them

to invent new words or use old ones in erroneous senses, in order to

express the meaning of the original, “a thing most dangerous in the

Sacred Scriptures.” He therefore forbids any such translations to

be thenceforward published without being approved by four doctors,

under pain of excommunication, desiring that the art which was first

of all discovered in his city, “not without divine aid,” should be

maintained in all its honour.

This mandate was only directed against the faulty translations of

the Holy Scriptures. No opposition was offered to the multiplication

of correct versions, both of the Latin Vulgate and its various

translations. The Cologne Bible, printed in 1479, had before this

appeared, with the formal approbation of the university. The very

first book printed by Gutenburg and Fust in 1453, was the Latin

Bible, and among the twenty-four books printed in Germany before the

year 1470 we find five Latin and two German editions of the Bible.

Translations of the Holy Scriptures into various modern tongues were

among the very first books issued from the press; as the Bohemian

version in 1475, Italian in 1471--which ran through eleven editions

before the close of the century, the Dutch in 1477, and the French

in the same year. The admirers of Luther have therefore fallen into

a strange error, when they represent him as the first to unlock the

Scriptures to the people, for twenty-four editions of the German

Bible alone had been printed and published before his time.

It was in the year 1476 that a little choir-boy of Utrecht entered

the college of Deventer, and gave such signs of genius and industry

as to draw from his masters the prediction that he would one day

be the light of his age. He was a namesake of the founder, but,

after the fashion of the day, adopted a Latin and Greek version of

his Flemish name of Gerard, and was to be known to posterity as

Desiderius Erasmus. Like Thomas à Kempis, he passed from the schools

of Deventer to the cloisters of the Canons Regular, a step which, he

assures us, was forced on him by his guardians, and never had his own

assent. A happy accident enabled him to visit Rome in the suite of

the Bishop of Cambray and once released from the wearisome discipline

of convent life, he never returned to it, but spent the rest of his

life wandering from one to another of the capitals of France, Italy,

and England, teaching for a livelihood, courted by all the literary

and religious parties of the day, and satirising them all by turns,

indisputably the literary Coryphæus of his age, but penetrated

through and through with its scoffing and presumptuous spirit. It was

an age fruitful in pedants and humanists, whose destiny it was to

help on the revolution in faith by a revolution in letters. Schools

and professors multiplied throughout Germany. At the very time

when Hegius was teaching the elements of Greek to Erasmus, his old

comrades Langius and Dringeberg were presiding over the schools of

Munster and Schelstadt. Rodolph Langius exerted himself strenuously

in the cause of polite letters, and whilst superintending his classes

occupied spare moments in correcting the text of almost every Latin

work which at that time issued from the press, and in making deadly

war on the scholastic philosophy. His rejection of the old-fashioned

school-books and his innovations on time-honoured abuses raised

against him the friars of Cologne, and a controversy ensued in which

Langius won so much success as enabled him to affix the stigma of

barbarism on his opponents. His friend and namesake Rodolph Agricola,

who had studied at Ferrara under Theodore of Gaza, and was held by

his admirers superior in erudition to Politian himself, at this time

presided over the school of Groningen. Besides his skill in the

learned tongues he was a poet, a painter, a musician, an orator,

and a philosopher. Such a multitude of accomplishments won him an

invitation to the court of the Elector Palatine at Heidelberg, where

a certain learned academy had been founded, called the Rhenish

Society, for the encouragement of Greek and Hebrew literature,

the members of which, says Hallam, “did not scorn to relax their

minds with feasting and dancing, not forgetting the ancient German

attachment to the flowing cup.” This is a polite way of rendering a

very ugly passage, which in the original tells us plainly that the

Rhenish academicians were addicted to excessive inebriety and other

disgraceful vices. It is somewhat remarkable, however, that Agricola,

who died three years after his removal to Heidelberg, received on his

death-bed the habit of those very friars whom, during life, he and

his friend Langius had done their best to hold up to popular contempt.

About the same time Reuchlin was studying at Paris, where, in 1458,

Gregory of Tiferno had been appointed Greek professor. Reuchlin

visited Rome, and translated a passage from Thucydides in the

presence of Argyrophilus, with such success that the Greek exclaimed,

in a transport of delight (and possibly of surprise, at such an

achievement on the part of a Northern barbarian), “Our banished

Greece has flown beyond the Alps!” Reuchlin was a Hebrew scholar, a

circumstance which, in the end, proved his ruin; for, embracing the

Cabalistic philosophy, he abandoned classics and good sense in the

pursuit of that absurd mysticism. In this strange infatuation he had

many companions. Not a few of those who had shown themselves foremost

in deriding the scholastic philosophy, ended by substituting in its

place either open scepticism or the philosophy of magic. A few years

later, the wild theories of Cornelius Agrippa, Paracelsus, and Jerome

Cardan, found eager adherents among those who conceived it a proof of

good scholarship to despise St. Thomas as a Goth. Reuchlin, whilst

pouring forth his bitter satires against the old theologians, was

printing his treatise on the Cabala, entitled _De Verbo Mirifico_,

wherein magic is declared to be the perfection of philosophy, which

work was formally condemned at Rome. However, all the French savants

of the Renaissance were not Cabalists, nor did all, when they

introduced the study of Greek, forget that it was the language of

the Gospels. The real restoration of Greek studies in France must

be ascribed to Budæus, who made up, by the piety and indefatigable

studies of his later years, for a youth of wild irregularity. He had

studied under Lascaris, and though he had reached a very mature age

before he devoted himself to letters, he soon became as familiar

with the learned tongues as with his native idiom. His treatise on

the Ancient Money first rendered his name famous, and secured him

the friendship of Francis I. He profited from the favour shown him

by that monarch, to solicit from him the foundation of the Royal

College of France, for the cultivation of the three learned tongues,

and thus fairly introduced the “Cecropian Muse” into the University

of Paris. If we may credit the authority of a grave rector of that

university, this momentous change was advantageous, not merely to

the minds but also to the morals of her students. St. Jerome, as we

know, imposed upon himself the study of Hebrew as an efficacious

means of taming the passions; and Rollin affirms that many who, in

former years, had been nothing but idle men of pleasure, when once

they began to read the Greek authors flung their vices and follies

to the winds, and led the simple and austere manner of life that

becomes a scholar. He quotes a passage from the manuscript Memoirs of

Henry de Mesmes, which gives a pleasant picture of the college life

of those days, and may be taken as an example of the sort of labour

imposed on a hard-working law student of the sixteenth century:--“My

father,” he says, “gave me for a tutor John Maludan of Limoges, a

pupil of the learned Durat, who was chosen for the innocence of his

life and his suitable age to preside over my early years, till I

should be old enough to govern myself. With him and my brother, John

James de Mesmes, I was sent to the college of Burgundy, and was put

into the third class and I afterwards spent almost a year in the

first. My father said he had two motives for thus sending me to the

college: the one was the cheerful and innocent conversation of the

boys, and the other was the school discipline, by which he trusted

that we should be weaned from the over-fondness that had been shown

us at home, and purified, as it were, in fresh water. Those eighteen

months I passed at college were of great service to me. I learnt to

recite, to dispute, and to speak in public; and I became acquainted

with several excellent men, many of whom are still living. I learned,

moreover, the frugality of the scholar’s life, and how to portion out

my day to advantage; so that, by the time I left, I had repeated, in

public, abundance of Latin, and two thousand Greek verses, which I

had written after the fashion of boys of my age, and I could repeat

Homer from one end to the other. I was thus well received by the

chief men of my time, to some of whom my tutor introduced me. In

1545, I was sent to Toulouse with my tutor and brother, to study law

under an old grey-haired professor, who had travelled half over the

world. There we remained for three years, studying severely, and

under such strict rules as I fancy few persons nowadays would care

to comply with. We rose at four, and, having said our prayers, went

to lectures at five, with our great books under our arms, and our

inkhorns and candlesticks in our hands. We attended all the lectures

until ten o’clock, without intermission; then we went to dinner,

after having hastily collated during half an hour what our master had

written down. After dinner, by way of diversion, we read Sophocles,

or Aristophanes, or Euripides, and sometimes Demosthenes, Tully,

Virgil, and Horace. At one we were at our studies again, returning

home at five to repeat and turn to the places quoted in our books

till past six. Then came supper, after which we read some Greek or

Latin author. On feast days we heard mass and vespers, and the rest

of the day we were allowed a little music and walking. Sometimes we

went to see our friends, who invited us much oftener than we were

permitted to go. The rest of the day we spent in reading, and we

generally had with us some learned men of that time.”

We have the satisfaction of knowing that the frugal and laborious

training of Henry’s early life was the means of forming a manly and

Christian character. Nor is the portrait less pleasing which the

biographer of Budæus has left us of the domestic life of that great

man, who, though he had visited the court of Leo X., in quality of

ambassador of France, and was the chief lion of the French world of

letters, retained to his dying day those simple tastes and habits,

which we are assured resulted from no affectation of laconic manners,

but a certain genuine sentiment of humility.[314] His secretary and

constant fellow-labourer was his wife, who sat in his study, found

out passages in his books of reference, copied his papers, and

withal did not forget his domestic comfort. Budæus needed some such

good angel by his side, for he belonged to that class of scholars

who are more familiar with the Latin _As_ than with the value of

louis d’ors. His mind was in his books, and whilst busy with the

doings of the Greeks and Romans he could not always call home his

absent thoughts. It is to be regretted, that with a character in

many respects so amiable, Budæus should have permitted his love of

Greek to lead him to take part with the Humanists in the ferocious

onslaughts which they directed against the adherents of the mediæval

learning. It was surely possible to revive the study of Homer and

Cicero with rejecting the philosophy of St. Thomas, nor did there

seem any reason why the lovers of polite literature should seek to

establish their fame as scholars by savage and unseemly pasquinades

on their literary rivals. And here it may be remarked that the title

of _Humanists_, applied to the rising school, was one of their own

choosing. By it they intended at one and the same time to indicate

themselves as the only cultivators of “humane” letters, and to imply

that the professors of the old school were barbarians. They were

not content with advocating good Latin, and reviving the study of

Greek; no one could join their camp who was not ready to rail at

monks and schoolmen as offensive idiots. The former, in the choice

vocabulary of Luther, were “locusts, caterpillars, frogs, and lice,”

the latter, in the more polished phraseology of Budæus, “prating

sophists,” and “divines of the Sorbonian Lake,” “Monks,” says Erasmus

(himself an apostate canon[315]), “are only acceptable to silly

women, bigots, and blockheads.” The Dominicans had the audacity to

protest against the freedoms he had taken with the Latin Vulgate,

and to complain of his version as that of a poet and orator rather

than of a divine. “Most men who know anything of the value of a

poet,” replies Erasmus, “think _you_ to be swine rather than men,

when they hear your stupid raving. Poetry is so little known to you,

that you cannot even spell its name;[316] but let me tell you, it

would be easier to cut two _Thomists_ out of a log of wood, than

one tolerable orator.” No matter what were a man’s talents, or how

reasonable were his arguments, the moment he opened his mouth in

opposition to these writers, he was placarded as a dunce. Erasmus,

in his new Version of the Greek Testament, had given just cause of

complaint by his use of a phraseology more elegant than theological.

A certain Franciscan friar ventured to object in particular to his

rendering of the Magnificat, whereupon Erasmus vented his spleen in

a Colloquy, and branded the critic as “a pig and a donkey; more of a

donkey than all donkeys put together;” and proceeded to justify his

translation by quoting the comedies of Terence. Standish, Bishop of

St. Asaph, took exception to another blot in the new version, the

substitution, namely, of the word _Sermo_, for that of _Verbum_, in

the first chapter of St. John’s Gospel; and Erasmus and his friends

considered that they sufficiently vindicated their good Latin by

nicknaming the objector, the _Bishop of St. Ass_. In the same style

of wit, Vincent the Dominican was _Bucentum_ the ox-driver, and the

Carmelites were commonly designated the _Camelites_. “I have hopes of

Cochlæus,” writes Luther, speaking of some of his adversaries, “he is

only an idiot; as for the other two, they belong to the devil.” This

was the ordinary style of the humanist controversialists; their puns

and sarcasms being, in most cases, accompanied with a shower of mud.

With these, however, we need not more particularly concern ourselves,

but turn our glance on Louvain, where, in the early part of the

century, a new university had arisen, under Duke John of Brabant,

which received its first diploma from Pope Martin V. in 1425, the

theological faculty being erected six years later by Eugenius IV. The

latter Pontiff had the satisfaction of receiving the firmest support

from the Louvain doctors during the troublous times of the Council

of Basle; and during the following century Louvain continued to be

not merely the chief seat of learning in Flanders, but one of the

soundest nurseries of the faith. She held stoutly to scholasticism,

and was distinguished by her resolute opposition to the Lutheran

heretics; yet it was in vain that her enemies attempted to charge her

with retrogression, for even Erasmus owns in his letters, that the

schools of Louvain were considered second only to those of Paris.

It is not difficult to explain the hostility which the Louvain

scholars had to encounter on the part of the partisans of the new

learning. Louvain, from the first, consecrated herself to the

defence of the scholastic theology. Immediately on the erection of

the theological faculty in 1431, the Dominicans arrived at Louvain,

and opened a school whence they sent forth fourteen doctors in the

space of twenty years. In 1447 they were formally admitted to all

the rights of the university, and obtained chairs of theology, and

the other privileges formerly granted to them at Paris and Bologna.

Their brethren were frequently aggregated to the college of the

strict faculty, and one of their order was always a member of the

council _strictæ facultatis_. From this period the _studium generale_

of the order at Louvain ranked as one of the highest character in

the order, and the influence of the Dominican doctors made itself

powerfully felt throughout the whole university. St. Thomas of Aquin

was _the_ doctor, _par excellence_, of the Louvain schools, and in

1637 was chosen by the faculty of theology their perpetual patron

and protector. It is needless to say that this determined _Thomism_

was not more agreeable to the humanists and their partisans than the

_Scotism_ of the Paris theologians; and they sought, with very poor

success, to squib down the university by representing it as nothing

but a nest of friars.

The University of Louvain enjoyed some advantages in which the

more ancient academies had been wanting. Not having grown up out

of accidental circumstances, like so many of her elder sisters,

but having been begun at a time when the principles necessary

for governing such institutions had been made manifest by long

experience, her founders were careful to provide her, from the first,

with a body of statutes sagaciously drawn up, so as to ensure the

preservation of regular discipline; and a well-organised collegiate

system protected the students from those disorders which had

disgraced the beginnings of Paris and Oxford.

In course of time separate schools and colleges were established for

the different faculties, one for medicine, eight for arts, and eight

for mixed studies. Among the latter was Standonch’s college of poor

scholars, and the celebrated _Collegium Trilingue_ founded in 1516 by

Jerome Busleiden, the friend of More and Erasmus, for the study of

Greek, Latin, and Hebrew. The idea of this academy had been suggested

to the founder by a visit to Alcala, where Cardinal Ximenes was then

completing the establishment of his university. Hallam tells us that

its foundation was fiercely opposed by the monks and friars, “those

unbeaten enemies of learning,” and it is true that the old professors

did at first regard the new institution with some jealousy. They had

been used to write and speak mediæval Latin, and grumbled sorely

when required to turn Ciceronians. The college happened to be first

opened in the fish-market, and hence arose the favourite bon-mot of

the Louvain Conservatives, “_We_ do not talk _Fish-Market_ Latin.” In

time, however, the fish-market Latin established its supremacy, and

Louvain grew proud of her classical professors, such as Louis Vives

and Conrad Goclen. The colleges gradually multiplied in number, and

even at the present day the city is filled with splendid buildings,

all of which owe their existence to the university of which they once

formed part.

It was at Louvain that Pope Adrian VI. received his education, and

from a poor scholar rose to fill the posts of professor and rector

of the university. The son of a boat-builder of Utrecht, he was

admitted among a certain number of poor boys whom the university

bound itself to educate gratuitously, and endured rather more than

his share of the hardships and privations to which scholars of that

class are usually exposed. Seldom able to provide himself with the

luxury of a lamp or a candle, he was accustomed to prosecute his

studies after dark in the porch of some church, where a lamp was then

usually suspended, or at the street corner, which supplied him with

a feeble light. However, he seems sometimes to have been able to

procure himself a better sort of light, for we read that, one cold

winter’s night, Margaret, the widow of Duke Charles of Burgundy,

then governess of the Netherlands, remarked a tiny ray that issued

from one of the college windows at a very late hour, and bidding

her chamberlain find out which of the students sat up so late in

such intense cold, she was told that it was only “little Florentius”

over his books. With a woman’s instinct of compassion, she sent him

the next day three hundred florins for the purchase of books and

firewood.

When he was afterwards raised to the head of the university,

he exhibited the same zeal for the promotion of ecclesiastical

discipline which afterwards won him so much unpopularity from his

Roman subjects. In spite of their contemptuous strictures on his

supposed barbarism, Adrian was revered in Louvain as a generous

patron of letters. He erected and endowed one of the most magnificent

colleges of which Louvain could boast, and in it was deposited the

autograph copy of his works, which is still preserved in the great

seminary of Mechlin.

A considerable number of other new universities sprang up in Germany

about the beginning of the sixteenth century, all more or less

stamped with the literary character of the age. Of these the most

famous was Wittemberg, marked out by an evil destiny as the cradle

of the Lutheran apostasy. It was founded in 1502 by Frederic,

elector of Saxony, who commissioned Staupitz, the provincial of the

Augustinians, to seek out men of learning and ability to fill its

vacant professorships. Luther was invited hither in 1508 to teach

the Aristotelian logic, and, four years later, after his return

from Rome, received his doctor’s cap, and took the customary oaths

to defend the faith against heresy to the last drop of his blood.

In 1516 the professor was to be found waging open war against the

philosophy he was engaged to teach, and drawing up ninety-nine theses

against the scholastic theology, in which is clearly laid down the

fundamental dogma of Lutheranism--the denial of free-will. They were

published many years later with a preface by Melancthon, declaring

them to contain the veritable sum of the reformed religion, which had

thus been reduced to system a year before that quarrel with Tetzel,

usually represented as the origin of Luther’s revolt.

Melancthon was given the chair of Greek in 1518, on the

recommendation of his master Reuchlin, and was introduced to

Wittemberg at the moment when Luther’s quarrel had been taken up by

the students and professors. In him Luther gained a disciple whose

learning and natural moderation of character were worthy of better

things than to become the author of the Confession of Augsburg,

and the colleague of Bucer. That horrible apostate, a renegade

Dominican, who condescended to every one of the rival schools of

heresy, provided only he was suffered to enjoy the license which

first tempted him to abjure the faith, filled for twenty years the

theological chair at Strasburg. Everywhere the reins of power had

fallen into the hands of the pedagogues, and the Lutheran army was

to be seen officered by humanists and university professors. The

facilities offered by the numerous academies that had sprung up since

the beginning of the century encouraged a rage for learning among all

classes, and many a poor artisan’s son, like Wolfgang Musculus, or

the notorious Henry Bullinger, scraped together a scanty pittance by

street singing, which they afterwards spent in procuring the means

of study at one or other of the universities. Musculus, indeed,

found charitable patrons in the person of some Benedictine monks,

who educated him, and gave him the habit; but he soon abandoned the

cloister, and after a wild adventurous life, during which we find him

working as a mason, and, during the scanty moments he could snatch

from his toil, studying the Hebrew grammar, he became “Minister” of

Strasburg, and theological professor in the Protestant University

of Berne. About the same time the Greek professorship of Calvin’s

college at Geneva was filled with another of these strange itinerant

scholars, Sebastian Castillon, a native of Dauphiny, who studied the

Oriental tongues in the early morning hours, before he went to his

day labour in the fields. He afterwards quarrelled with Calvin, who

accused him of theft, and went to teach Greek and Hebrew at Basle.

Here he produced a Latin and French version of the Scriptures, and

endeavoured to render the sacred books into the classical diction of

profane authors. We can scarcely form any correct idea of the period

of the Reformation without a glimpse at men of this stamp, who then

swarmed in every part of Germany; restless, self-sufficient, often

more than half self-taught, their minds untrained with the healthy

discipline of the schools, disposed to run after every novelty, and

to overvalue themselves and their attainments, they inevitably fell

into the extravagances to which vanity commonly betrays her victims.

From this class of men the German professorships were chiefly

recruited, and little foresight was needed to anticipate the

consequences which must ensue when the work of education had passed

into such hands. The state of the German universities during the

century subsequent to the Lutheran revolution, has been described

by the Protestant historian Menzel, from whom Rohrbacher has quoted

some remarkable passages. “The colleges where the future ministers

of the Lutheran religion spent six or seven years, were the abode

of a ferocity and licentiousness from which our moral sensibility

shrinks aghast. In the German schools and universities, the elder

students obliged new-comers to go about in ragged garments, filled

their mouths with ‘soup’ made of mud and broken bits of earthenware,

compelled them to clean their boots and shoes, and by way of salary,

to imitate the barking of dogs and the mewing of cats, and to lick

up the filth from under the table. In vain did the princes endeavour

to banish these savage customs; they held their ground in spite of

ordinances and edicts.”[317] At the University of Jena, the younger

students were robbed of their money, their clothes, and their

books by their elder companions, and compelled to discharge the

most disgraceful services. Those who had received what was called

“absolution,” treated new-comers in the same way; and these outrages

were often committed in the streets, and even in the churches during

the preaching, when the poor victims were pulled and knocked about,

and otherwise maltreated by their persecutors. And that no one

might escape, a particular part of the church was devoted to the

reception of “freshmen,” who were installed there with these edifying

ceremonies. Hence, during the whole time of divine service, one

incessant clamour went on, made up of the trampling, the cries, the

murmurs, and coarse laughter of the combatants.

If such were the manners of the future pastors, those of their

flocks may be imagined. Any one who tried to lead a good life,

observes Menzel, was stigmatised as an enthusiast, a Schwenkfeldian,

an Anabaptist, and a hypocrite; Luther’s dogma of justification

by faith only having brought good works into actual discredit. It

was dangerous at that time for a preacher to exhort his people to

keep the commandments--as if they were able to do so--it was quite

sufficient to render him a suspected person.[318] But we have no

heart to dwell on this subject, or to realise the degradation of

those old German dioceses and schools, the names of which are

so linked in our hearts with the memory of St. Boniface and St.

Wilibald, St. Bernward and St. Anscharius. So we will turn our

back on Germany and seek on Catholic soil for some more consoling

spectacle. We shall hardly find it in France: there, indeed, a

revival of letters is going on, under the splendid patronage of

Francis I.; and Budæus, the prodigy of his country, as Erasmus

called him, is writing his learned treatise on Ancient Money, and

persuading the king to found the College Royal. There perhaps the

greatest scholar of his time, though known to posterity chiefly by

his artistic fame, Leonardo da Vinci, is expiring at Fontainebleau

in the arms of the king. But the French Renaissance school is mostly

remarkable for its poets, by whom, indeed, the revival of letters was

first set on foot. Much edification was not to be anticipated from a

movement that reckoned as its originator Villon, whose verses were

as infamous as his life, and who found a worthy successor in Clement

Marot. The French kings, who by their Pragmatic Sanctions[319] had

condemned the Papal provision of benefices as a crying abuse, used

their royal patronage of the same as a convenient mode of rewarding

Court poets. Thus Octavien de St. Gelais, the translator of Terence,

obtained the bishopric of Angoulême from Charles VIII.; and his

son, Melin de St. Gelais, surnamed the French Ovid, was rewarded

by Francis I. for his “Epigrams” with an abbey. Ronsard, formally

proclaimed “the Poet of France, _par excellence_,” who was born on

the same day as the defeat of Pavia--as though (to make use of the

king’s words) “Heaven would make up to France, by his birth, for

the disgrace sustained by her arms”--who was the literary idol of

his time, had statues erected to his honour, and silver images of

the goddess Minerva presented to him by learned academies, to whom

Elizabeth sent a rich diamond, and Mary Stuart presented a gilded

model of Parnassus--the most appropriate present that could be

offered to the new Apollo--Ronsard, the vainest of men, as he might

well be, for assuredly he was the most flattered, died, literally

overwhelmed under the weight of his laurels and his priories. I will

not attempt the enumeration of his benefices, and perhaps he would

hardly have undertaken the task himself, for the prince of poets

enjoyed the revenues of half the royal monasteries of France. It

would be unbecoming to notice any writer of less renown, after so

very illustrious a personage, and the bare name of Rabelais will

probably content most readers. These were the stars of the French

Renaissance, well worthy of the monarch who patronised them, and

the Court over which he presided. Warton has thought good to praise

the enlightened wisdom which induced this prince to purge his Court

from the monkish precision of old-fashioned times, and enliven it

with a larger admixture of ladies’ society. There was certainly not

much to be complained of on the score of precision in the coteries

of Fontainebleau; yet it is curious that the fair dames who graced

the royal circle were chosen by the grim disciples of Calvin as the

likeliest agents for disseminating their views. The ladies of the

Court of Francis I. were the first Huguenot apostles, and it was

in this school that Anne Boleyn, in her quality of maid of honour

to Queen Claude, acquired, together with her inimitable skill in

dancing, that “gospel light” which, the poet informs us, first shone

on England and her king “from Boleyn’s eyes.”

Let us rather direct our steps across the Pyrenees, and watch the

erection of a Catholic university on the orthodox soil of Spain.

Up to this time the education which prevailed in the peninsula

appears to have been thoroughly of the old school. The Spanish

universities had indeed some peculiarities arising from their

proximity to the Moorish schools, and appear to have cultivated the

geometrical sciences and the Eastern tongues more generally than

was elsewhere the practice. But the prevailing tone was scholastic

and ecclesiastical. The monasteries still maintained those public

schools, which served as feeders to the universities, and in these a

discipline was kept up differing very little from that of Fulda and

St Gall. At Montserrat, peasants and nobles were received together,

and each wore a little black habit, and, in church, a surplice. They

sang every day at the Mass, and recited the Office of Our Lady,

eating always in the refectory of the brethren, and sleeping in a

common dormitory. Every month they went to confession, as well as on

all festivals, and their studies were of the monastic stamp, with

plenty of Latin and plain chant, and also instrumental music. A

number of the bravest Spanish knights had their education in these

monastery schools, and one of them, John of Cardonna, who commanded

the galleys of Sicily, and relieved Malta when besieged by the Turks,

chose as his patroness, in memory of his school days, Our Lady of

Montserrat, and bore her banner into battle. He used to call himself

Our Lady’s page, and said he valued the privilege of having been

brought up in her house more than his rank as admiral.

But these are old-fashioned memories, and must give place to

something more in accordance with the requirements of the age. The

Renaissance was making its way even into the Spanish schools, and the

literary movement had been fortunate enough to find a nursing mother

in the person of Isabella the Catholic. German printers and Italian

professors were invited into her kingdom, and Spanish students sent

to gather up the treasures of learning in foreign academies. Among

these was Antonio de Lebrija, whom Hallam calls the restorer of

classical literature in Spain. Italian masters directed the education

of the royal children, and from them the Princess Catherine, doomed

to be the hapless Queen of Henry VIII., received those learned tastes

which won the admiration of Erasmus. A Palatine school was attached

to the Court, in imitation of that of Charlemagne, and was placed

under the direction of Peter Martyr,[320] whose letters are filled

with accounts of the noble pupils who thronged his school, won from

frivolous pastimes by the charm of letters. In 1488 he appeared at

Salamanca to deliver lectures on Juvenal, and writes word that the

audience who came to hear him so blocked up the entrance to the

hall, that he had to be carried to his place over the heads of the

students, “like a victor in the Olympic games.” The rage for learning

went on at such a pace that the proudest grandees of Castile thought

it not beneath them to ascend the professor’s chair, and even noble

ladies delivered lectures on classical learning in the halls of

universities.[321] The queen’s noble encouragement of learning had

been fostered by her confessor, F. Francis Ximenes; and when, in

1495, the Franciscan friar became Archbishop of Toledo and Primate

of Spain, one of his first thoughts was the erection of a model

university, to which he resolved to devote the immense revenues of

his see.

It has been said that seats of learning require the accessories of a

fine air, and even the charms of natural scenery; and we might quote

one of the most exquisite pieces of word-painting to be found in any

language,[322] which is written to show the special gift enjoyed by

Athens, rendering her worthy to be the capital of mind. It was the

clear elastic air of Attica which communicated something of its own

sunniness and elasticity to the intellect of her citizens, just as

it imparted a golden colouring even to the marble dug out of that

favoured soil. So it had been with Paris, the Athens of the Middle

Ages, where students from the foggy shores of Britain conceived

themselves endowed with some new faculty when relieved from the

oppression of their native atmosphere. And even Louvain, though less

favoured than these by nature, had been chosen in preference to other

Flemish cities, chiefly on account of her purer air and her pleasant

_entourage_ of copses and meadows, with their abundant store of

“corn, apples, sheep, oxen, and chirping birds.”

It is not surprising, therefore, that Ximenes, when seeking the

fittest spot in which to plant his academy, took very gravely

into consideration the question of scenery and climate. The clear

atmosphere of Alcala, and the tranquil landscapes on the banks of

the Henares, so soothing to the meditative eye, had their share in

determining him to fix his foundation at the ancient Complutum. In

its grammar schools he had made his early studies, and old boyish

recollections attached him to the spot, the ancient traditions of

which rendered it dear to Christian scholars.[323] There, then, in

the year 1500 he laid the foundation of his first college, which

he dedicated to his saintly predecessor, St. Ildefonsus. This was

intended to be the head college of the university, to which all

the others were in a manner to be subordinate. It consisted of

thirty-three professors, in honour of the years of our Lord’s earthly

life, and twelve priests or chaplains, in honour of the twelve

Apostles. These latter had nothing to do with the education of the

students, but were to recite the divine office in common, and carry

out the rites of the Church with becoming solemnity. The professors,

who were all to be theologians, were distinguished by their dress, a

long red robe, which, being flung over their left shoulder, hung to

the ground in large and graceful folds. The colleges of St. Balbina

and St. Catherine were intended for students in philosophy, each

containing forty-eight students. There was a small college, dedicated

to Our Lady, for poor students in theology and medicine; and a larger

one, used for the reception of the sick. The college of SS. Peter

and Paul was exclusively for Franciscan scholars, corresponding in

character to the monastic colleges or houses of study at Oxford.

There were also two classical schools for young students, forty-two

of whom received a free education for three years; these were

severally dedicated to St. Eugenius and St. Isidore. And lastly,

there was the college of St. Jerome for the three languages, in

which ten scholars studied Latin, ten Greek, and ten Hebrew; a

foundation which, as we have seen, formed the model on which the

_Collegium Trilingue_ at Louvain was afterwards established.[324]

I will say nothing of the libraries, refectories, and chapels, all

of which were finished with great splendour; and the whole city was

restored and beautified, so as to make it more worthy of being the

site of so magnificent a seat of learning. Other houses of study

soon sprang up in connection with the different religious orders,

all of which were anxious to secure for their members advantages

which were nowhere else to be found in such abundance. For though

Ximenes was a mighty builder, and thereby exposed himself to many

bad puns from Court wits, who made much of the “_edification_” he

gave when he superintended his workmen rule in hand, he certainly

did not neglect the spiritual for the material building. Eight years

after he had solemnly laid the foundation stone of his first college,

the university was opened, and a brilliant staff of professors--in

all forty-two in number--were gathered round the Cardinal primate

to receive their respective offices from his hands. The government

of the university was vested in the hands of a chancellor, rector,

and senate. The system of graduation was copied from that of Paris,

except that the theological degrees were given a pre-eminence over

the others, and made both more honourable and more difficult to

attain. The professorships were distributed as follows:--Six for

theology; six for canon law; four for medicine; one, anatomy; one,

surgery; nine, philosophy; one, mathematics; four, Greek and Hebrew;

four, rhetoric; and six, grammar. There was no chair of civil

law, as this faculty was excellently taught at the other Spanish

universities, and Ximenes had no liking for it, and did not wish to

introduce it at Alcala, probably fearing lest it might prevent that

predominance of the theological faculty which he desired should be

the characteristic of his university. Provision was made for the

support of the aged and infirm professors; and on this point the

Cardinal consulted his former colleague in the regency of Castile,

Adrian of Utrecht, and established similar regulations to those

which existed at Louvain. The system of studies and rule of college

discipline were drawn up by himself, the former being in a great

degree borrowed from that established at Paris. Frequent disputations

and examinations quickened the application of the students, and

at these Ximenes loved to preside, and encourage the emulation of

his scholars with his presence. In the choice of his professors he

considered nothing but the merit of the candidates, and set at

nought all the narrowness of mere nationality. Spain was by this

time, however, able to furnish humanists and philologists equal to

those of Italy or Germany. And most of the first professors were

of native birth. Among them was Antonio de Lebrija, and though he

afterwards accepted a chair at Salamanca, yet he finally returned to

Alcala, and rendered invaluable aid to Ximenes in the philological

labours in which he was about to engage, and which shed an additional

lustre over the new academy.

Ximenes had always manifested a peculiar predilection for the

cultivation of Biblical literature. In his earlier years his love of

the Holy Scriptures had induced him to devote himself to the study of

Hebrew and Chaldaic, and he had often been heard to say that he would

willingly give up all his knowledge of jurisprudence to be able to

explain a single verse of the Bible. He considered a thorough revival

of biblical studies the surest means of defeating the new heretics,

and in the midst of Court engagements and political toils, he at

length conceived the plan of his great Polyglot Bible, in which the

sacred text was to appear in the four learned languages, after the

most correct versions that could be obtained. This great work, which

was to serve as the model for all subsequent attempts of a similar

kind, was no sooner designed than he set about its execution, and

secured the co-operation of a number of skilful scholars, fixing on

Alcala as the scene of their labours. Immense sums were expended in

obtaining Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and Chaldaic manuscripts; and in his

dedication, Ximenes acknowledges the invaluable assistance which he

received from Pope Leo X. The plan was exactly one sure to engage the

sympathies of that generous Pontiff, who accordingly placed at his

command all the treasures of the Vatican Library. The costly work

when complete presented the Hebrew text of the Old Testament, the

Greek version of the Septuagint, the Latin version of St. Jerome,

and the Chaldaic paraphrase of the Pentateuch, together with certain

letters, prefaces, and dissertations to assist the study of the

Sacred Books. The work was commenced in 1502, and the last volume

was published in 1517. The same energy which had succeeded, in the

brief space of eight years, in raising a university which received

the title of “the eighth wonder of the world,” was able, in fifteen

years, to bring to a happy conclusion a literary undertaking which

might well have occupied thrice that space of time. Ximenes, who felt

his end approaching, desired to leave all his great works complete,

and urged on his scholars with frequent admonitions on the shortness

of human life. If _they_ lost _him_ as their patron, or if _he_ were

to lose _their_ labours, the whole design might fall to the ground.

On the 10th of July 1517 the last sheet of the great Complutensian

Polyglot was printed, and the young son of the printer, Bocario,

putting on his holiday garments, ran at once to present it to the

Cardinal. Ximenes received it with a solemn emotion of gratitude and

joy. “I thank Thee, O Lord Christ,” he said, “that Thou hast brought

this work to a desired end.” It was as though he had been permitted

this as his last earthly consolation, for four months later he closed

his great and useful career, being in the eighty-second year of his

age.

Louvain and Alcala, the two great Catholic creations of the age

of the Renaissance, both fell under the hammer of Revolution. The

memory of Ximenes has not prevailed to preserve his university from

destruction at the hands of the Spanish Progressistas, and we can but

hope that its restoration may be reserved for another generation.

That of Louvain has been witnessed even in our own time. Swept away

in 1797 by the decree of the French Republic, which at the same

time suppressed all the great ecclesiastical seminaries, it was not

restored by the Nassau sovereigns who, in 1814, became masters of

the Catholic Netherlands. William of Holland, so far from showing

his Catholic subjects any larger degree of favour than they had

enjoyed under French rule, did his best to render their position

worse than it had been under the Revolution. He put down all the

little seminaries, and proposed to supply the place of the ancient

university of Louvain by a grand royal philosophical college, through

which all ecclesiastical students were to be compelled to pass before

being received into the great seminaries. This was in the June of

1825; in the January of 1830 the determined resistance of the Belgian

Catholics obliged him to suppress his college, which had proved a

total failure. The August following witnessed the expulsion of his

dynasty and the establishment of Belgian independence; events which

were followed in 1834 by the erection at Louvain of a new university,

in virtue of an Apostolic brief of Pope Gregory XVI.

Planted on the Belgian soil, which has so long and so successfully

resisted the inroads of heresy, and which appears destined in our own

day to become the battle-ground of a yet deadlier struggle with open

unbelief, the Catholic university of Louvain has already merited to

be declared by illustrious lips “the glory of Belgium and of the

Church.” She has been presented by the Sovereign Pontiff to the

Catholics of these islands, as the model on which our own academic

restorations may fitly be formed; and at this very moment her example

is understood to have encouraged the prelates of Germany to attempt

a similar foundation in that land. May their generous efforts be

crowned with ample success, and may such institutions, wherein Faith

and Science will never be divorced, multiply in the Church, supported

by the prayers and good wishes of every Catholic heart.

_CHAPTER XXII._

THE RENAISSANCE IN ROME.

A.D. 1513 TO 1528.

On the morning of the 11th of April 1513 the streets of Rome were

thronged with a joyous and expectant crowd, assembled to witness the

public procession of the newly-elected Pontiff, Leo X., on occasion

of his taking possession of the Basilica of St. John Lateran. Many

circumstances combined to render the accession of Leo welcome to

his new subjects: they had already felt the charm of his courteous

manners, springing partly from careful culture, and partly from an

innate kindness of heart; and whilst the Roman citizens, who were

heartily tired of the wars and war-taxes of Julius II., rejoiced

at the prospect of peace and plenty, the artists and professors,

who made up a population by themselves, regarded the election of

a Medici as a sufficient guarantee for the protection of their

personal interests. The son of Lorenzo, and the pupil of Politian,

of Chalcondylus, and of Bernard Dovizi, he had imbibed a love of art

and poetry in the gardens of Florence and the villas of Fiesole.

Created a Cardinal at the age of fourteen, he was but thirty-seven

at the period of his election to the Papal chair, and during his

residence at Rome under the two preceding Pontificates had acquired

a character which his friends condensed into a motto, and exhibited

in golden letters on the canopy under which he was enthroned,

_Litteratorum præsidium ac bonitatis fautor_. If an ancient statue

had been disinterred in the baths of Titus, the Cardinal de’ Medici

had been the first to celebrate the auspicious event in graceful

iambics improvised to the music of his lyre; his house had been the

_rendezvous_ of artists, poets, and, above all, of musicians; and

whilst men of this stamp loudly proclaimed the taste and munificence

of the new Pontiff, the unblemished name which he had preserved in

the midst of a society the corruptions of which were matter of

public notoriety, put to silence the busy tongue of scandal.

It was truly, therefore, a festa-day which his subjects were

now celebrating; and as he rode on his white charger through

the brilliant streets, men contrasted his mild and _débonnaire_

countenance, his gay smile, and affable address; with the imperious

bearing of his predecessor, the warlike Julius; and the contrast was

all to his advantage. What a scene it was through which he was now

passing! Rome had been all but rebuilt under the four last Pontiffs,

and from the Vatican to the Coliseum the way was marked with

monuments of their munificence and of the genius of their artists.

Domes, amphitheatres, arcades, and fountains had risen during the

last seventy years with magnificent profusion; the old Basilica of

the Apostles had disappeared, and was in process of being replaced

by a pile worthy of the vast conceptions of its founders and its

architects. And now the splendid city had decked herself in gala

costume, and amid velvet tapestries and flowery wreaths, triumphal

arches, and private houses, with their facades improvised into

heathen temples, appeared a strange medley of saints and mythological

characters, in which the statues of Mars, Apollo, Minerva, and Venus,

were exhibited in close proximity to those of SS. Peter and Paul.

On the whole, however, the classic element predominated, and the

characters chosen at each resting-place to harangue the new Pontiff

were the Muses, the Seasons, and their attendant nymphs.

The hopes and expectations of the Roman populace on that day were

abundantly fulfilled. Leo did his best to restore peace to Italy,

and raised Rome to the dignity of a great capital. Few princes have

ever been more richly endowed than he with the qualities which make

princedom popular; a liberality which bordered on profuseness, a

generous readiness to reward merit, and a charming urbanity of

manners, which made every one who approached his person believe

himself the object of the Pope’s particular regard. Erasmus felt

the magical influence of his presence, and wrote to his friends,

saying, that Leo was as far superior to the rest of men, as men

are superior, to beasts. “He has the genius and the virtues of all

the Leos who have preceded him, and to perfect goodness of heart,”

he continues, “he unites an incredible strength of soul.” In the

church all beholders admired the majesty with which he officiated

at the sacred ceremonies; and his temperate habits in private have

been praised by all his biographers. He was not only a passionate

lover of literature and science, but was firmly persuaded that the

cultivation of letters, rightly regarded, is ever friendly to the

faith. “I have always loved learned men and good letters,” he wrote

to Henry VIII. “This attraction was born with me, and it has only

increased with years; for I always see that those who cultivate

literature are most firmly attached to the dogmas of the faith, and

form the glory of the Christian Church.” His patronage of arts and

letters, therefore, was hearty and munificent enough to satisfy even

the requirements of the learned world around him. He restored the

Roman University, and appointed a brilliant staff of professors,

men not only of the first ability, but of exemplary life. In his

Bull addressed to the students, he failed not to warn them against

substituting Plato and the poets for more serious studies, and

reminded the preceptors that they were called on to defend the faith

as well as to teach good letters. His own tastes, however, had the

character which might have been anticipated from his education: they

inclined almost exclusively to the _belles-lettres_. In many cases

the classic acquirements of those who were now promoted to canonries

and Cardinals’ hats were more regarded than their personal merits.

Bernard Dovizi, who, as tutor to the young Medici, had studiously and

successfully laboured to confer on his manners that exquisite polish

which was his greatest charm, was now raised to the purple, and,

as Cardinal Bibiena, endeavoured to surround the Pontifical palace

with every attraction of a secular Court. The literary public of

those days was not easily scandalised, but it was at least taken by

surprise by the first production which came from the new Cardinal’s

pen, his comedy of “Calandra,” written as a carnival piece for the

amusement of a noble lady, and acted in the private apartments of

the Vatican.[325] Ariosto was also welcomed at Court, and even the

infamous Aretino received marks of favour, whilst Bembo and Sadolet,

the two first Latinists of their day, were appointed the Pope’s

secretaries.

The patronage of Leo was not limited to any one kind of literary

excellence. He was as ready to reward a scientific treatise as an

imitation of Horace, and whilst encouraging the study of the Eastern

tongues, and publishing at his own expense a magnificent edition

of Tacitus from the unique manuscript obtained from the abbey of

Old Corby, he was accepting the dedication of Italian tragedies and

causing the “Rosamunda” of Ruccellai to be acted in his presence.

Almost his first act after his accession to the Papal dignity

was to summon Lascaris to Rome, and establish him in a palace on

the Esquiline, where, in concert with Musurus, he superintended

a Greek academy and printing press. Zenobius Acciajoli, the most

learned Orientalist of his day, who had shone among the stars of

Lorenzo’s Court, and had afterwards assumed the Dominican habit and

dedicated his genius to sacred studies, now became Prefect of the

Vatican Library; whilst another Oriental scholar of the same order,

the celebrated Sanctes Pagninus, found generous encouragement to

undertake his Latin translation of the Scriptures from the original

tongues.

But whilst extending his splendid patronage to every department of

literature, the personal predilections of Leo were undoubtedly for

poetry and the arts. Like a true Medici he loved the sunny side of

life, and delighted in surrounding himself with poets, wits, and

musicians, he himself being the gayest wit and best musician of the

party. The Court was crowded with professional improvisatori who

enlivened the suppers at the Vatican with their jests and pastimes.

In the mornings there were literary assemblies in which the great men

of the day recited their poems or epigrams, or more learned works.

Now it was Vida, whom Leo had engaged to undertake the composition

of his “Christiad,” and who beguiled his lighter hours by setting

forth the mysteries of the game of chess in Latin hexameters; or

Paulus Jovius,[326] the Italian Livy, who came to read a chapter of

his history; or “the divine Accolti,” as he was called, who recited

his poems surrounded by a guard of honour, and who in return for his

lyric productions was raised to the dukedom of Nepi and a bishopric.

Under such a _régime_ the arts flourished, and men of letters were

promoted to wealth and dignities; Rome grew daily more luxurious and

more splendid, but, alas! it must be said, her moral atmosphere was

a pestilence. The historian Mariana declares that at the opening of

the sixteenth century greater disorders existed there than were to

be witnessed in any other European capital. Even Bembo, whose own

life at this time was a disgrace to the ecclesiastical habit, admits

the charge, and owns that he who desired to lead a holy life would

do well to fly from Rome.[327] What else could be anticipated of a

society made up of artists and professors, paganised to the very core

in its literature, its language, and its every maxim? And when we

say _paganised_, let it not be supposed that the simple restoration

of classical studies is here intended, or that the abuses complained

of consisted only of the extravagances of a few learned pedants. In

Italian literary circles, if we may credit historians of the time,

the Christian ideas were slowly becoming obliterated. It had grown

fashionable in certain coteries to scoff at all the Christian dogmas

as obsolete and barbarous; and Antonio Bandino complains that you

were no longer regarded as a man of education unless you could jest

at the Scriptures and indulge in some witty piece of scepticism.

Many of the Italian schools were deeply infected with infidelity,

particularly the University of Padua, which for more than a century

had been notorious as the focus of atheism. Pomponatus,[328] one of

the Paduan professors, published a treatise on the immortality of the

soul, during the reign of Leo X., in which he endeavoured to show

that the doctrine was not held by Aristotle, that it rested _only_ on

the authority of Scripture and the Church, and was plainly opposed

to reason. A great number of professors taught similar errors, and

pretended that though contrary to revelation they might yet be taught

as _philosophically_ true. These were condemned in 1513 by the Fifth

Council of Lateran, which formally declared that “truth could not

contradict truth;” and to counteract the dangerous spirit prevalent

in the universities it was at the same time decreed that students

aspiring to sacred orders should not follow the course of philosophy

and poetry for more than five years, unless at the same time they

studied theology and canon law.[329] But little or no fruit was

produced by this decree, and as we shall see, at a somewhat later

period the “great and pernicious abuses” which were admitted as

loudly demanding reform, were formally declared by a commission of

Cardinals to have arisen mainly from the impious teaching tolerated

in the public schools.

In fact, Italy was at this time _professor-ridden_. Of all odious

dogmatisms surely that of pedagogues is the most intolerable form

of social tyranny, and under this the Transalpine world was then

groaning. Armed with their pens and their tinsel eloquence the men

of letters wrote down and talked down all opposition, and made so

much noise in the world that they seemed for a time to occupy a much

larger and more influential position than was really the case. They

dictated their laws to the literary world, and every one who would

not be pasquinaded as a barbarian was content to follow the fashion.

So in the pulpit preachers called on their audience to contemplate

the examples of Epaminondas or Socrates; parallels were drawn between

the sacred events of the Passion, and the self-devotion of a Curtius

or a Decius: our Divine Lord was commonly spoken of as a hero who had

deserved well of his country, and not unfrequently allusions would

be introduced to the thunders of Jupiter and the stories of heathen

mythology.

The grand object of Italian scholars at this time was to attain a

pure Ciceronian style, and in this none were more successful than

the two papal secretaries, Sadolet and Bembo. The pains taken by the

latter on his compositions at least deserved success. He is said

to have kept forty portfolios, into each of which his sheets were

successively entered, and only passed on to the one next in order

after undergoing careful revision. The rejection of every phrase not

absolutely Ciceronian led to very strange affectation when speaking

of events of ordinary life, as well as to the more offensive fault

of adopting heathen phraseology on matters relating to the Christian

faith. Thus the accession of Leo was announced to foreign Courts as

having taken place “through the favour of the Immortal Gods;” Divine

grace was the _magnificentia divinitatis_; Our Lady was the _Dea

Lauretana_, or the _Alma Parens_; and the Christian mysteries were

described in terms taken from the sacrificial terminology of the

Greeks. Erasmus had good sense enough to despise these extravagances,

and he did his utmost to render them ridiculous.[330] He describes

the Ciceronian spending a whole winter’s night on the composition of

a single sentence, compiling lexicons of Ciceronian words, tropes,

locutions, and pleasantries, more bulky than the great orator’s

entire works, and struggling with the insuperable difficulties of

rendering the wants and habits of a modern age into the colloquial

phraseology of the ancients.

The poets and artists followed the example set them by the

professors. They still occasionally condescended to choose Christian

subjects, but in most cases it was to debase them by a pagan method

of treatment. When Sannazar thought fit to employ his muse on so

old-fashioned a theme as the birth of Our Lord, he converted it into

a pagan fable, placed the prophecies of the Sibyls in the hands of

the Blessed Virgin, and the words of Isaias in the mouth of Proteus,

omitted the name of Jesus Christ throughout his entire poem, and

surrounded the holy crib with nymphs, satyrs, and hamadryads.

The very liturgy of the Church had a narrow escape of undergoing

a classical reform, and a new _Hymnarium_ appeared, drawn up by

Zachario Ferreri, “according to the true rules of Latinity and

metre,” in which, says Dom Guéranger, “occur every image and allusion

to pagan belief and customs which are to be met with in Horace.”

This work was undertaken by command of Leo X., but its use, though

permitted by Clement VII., was happily never enjoined on the clergy.

Hand in hand with the paganism of literature advanced the paganism

of morals. We are not here engaged in studying the history of the

Church, and may therefore be spared the pain of contemplating her

scandals--those scandals the existence of which, far from weakening

our faith, may rather confirm it, when we remember that they were

distinctly prophesied by her Divine Head as evils which “must needs

be” accomplished. Our business is with schools and scholars, and,

sooth to say, after wandering amid the dim religious light of the

mediæval cloisters, the blaze of the Roman literary circles, after

first dazzling our eyes, reveals such bewildering spectacles, that

we look about for some retreat into which the Christian scholar may

creep and hide himself.

Such, perhaps, was the feeling of many a student who, coming fresh

from the schools of Louvain, or the cloisters of Winchester or

Oxford, found himself suddenly dropped down upon a world which seemed

to have broken loose from all time-honoured traditions of scholastic

life. Perhaps he had been used to set before him the musty maxim

of Philip the Almoner,[331] that “that is no true science which is

not the companion of justice;” or he had learned from Hugh of St.

Victor to regard humility as the foundation of wisdom; or he was

familiar with the saying of the Angel of the schools, that the best

way to make progress in philosophy was to keep the commandments

of God. But if he had the gift of prudence, he would think twice

before citing such authorities in the polite circles of the Roman

_literati_. He would have been hooted at as a barbarian. The monks

and schoolmen were never spoken of by the professors of the new

learning save in terms of execration and contempt. They were, to use

the language of Erasmus, wretched creatures, whose language was as

uncouth as their apprehension was dull. In those days there was no

greater reproach than to call a man a _Scotist_--it meant precisely

a _dunce_[332]--and those who held communion with the Muses and

the Graces would have judged it an affront to be required to treat

with respect the memory of St. Thomas or St. Bonaventure. And truly

their venerable names, and the maxims they had laid down for the

guidance of Christian scholars, would have been sadly out of place

in the sumptuous orgies of the Chigi palace, or those luxurious

soirées where prelates, ambassadors, and men of letters did not

refuse to appear as the guests of the most questionable characters.

The Roman academy which had been suppressed by Paul II., and had

revived under Julius II., was now at the height of its renown. Its

members generally met in some delicious suburban garden, and there,

under the shade of the thick foliage, in an atmosphere heavy with

the perfume of the orange-flower, they recited poems, proposed

philosophic questions, and whiled away with song and merriment long

hours of the day and night. Amid scenes of such Epicurean enjoyment

the stranger might have been forgiven had he imagined himself taking

part in the revelries of pagan rather than of Christian Rome. On the

walls of the luxurious banqueting-rooms, in which he assisted at

those suppers of world-wide celebrity, he might see representations

from the comedies of Plautus, reminding him how close a parallel

was to be drawn between the manners described by the Latin poet and

those of the sixteenth century. From the elegant revellers around

him he might hear the authority of Pliny quoted to prove that the

human soul differed in nothing from that of beasts; or, exchanging

the philosophic for a lighter mood, he might perhaps be called on to

assist at some macaronic exhibition, such as the crowning of Querno,

the drunken buffoon, arch-poet of Rome; or be required to listen

to the facetious improvisation of Folengo or Mariano Fetti,--the

former a monk, the latter a friar,--both of whom had quitted their

cloisters to ply the trade of professional jesters. Thankful enough

he would be to escape from these polished circles and return to

his own barbarous land and the society of those rude English, who,

as Politian contemptuously remarked, “knew nothing of letters, and

busied themselves with their sheep,” and who perhaps might, in their

turn, have thought with the Psalmist, that it was well with those who

knew no literature, and were only mindful of justice.[333]

We are not left merely to conjecture the abuses which throve in such

a soil. We have the grave avowal of the commission of Cardinals

already referred to, that “in no city was there to be witnessed such

corruption of manners as in this city, which should be an example to

all.” Vice, in fact, had ceased to wear a veil; it stalked abroad

under the noonday sun, and too often found illustrious support. Yet,

strange to say, the existing abuses, monstrous as they were, were

more superficial than they seemed. The evil scum that rises to the

surface of society must not always be taken as a test of what lies

beneath; the gaudy charlock may toss its wanton head and blazon

itself to the eye, but the good seed is quietly germinating below,

and in the day of harvest its sheaves will not be wanting. The

Church is happily not governed by professors and scholastics, and

at the very time when the literary world of Rome was exhibiting the

spectacles described above, the Fifth Council of Lateran was holding

its sessions in that very city, and promulgating its decrees for

the reform of the Universities, the College of Cardinals, and the

Roman Court.[334] The Church, by the mouth of her episcopate, was

solemnly exposing and condemning those very evils which thoughtless

observers were perhaps laying to her charge. In the decree of the

Council on the study of the Scriptures and the liberal arts, the

Fathers, after setting forth the vital importance of the education

of youth, go on to declare that schoolmasters and professors are

bound not merely to teach their scholars grammar and rhetoric, but

yet more to instruct them in their religion, and to make them study

sacred hymns and psalms, and the lives of the saints; and forbid

anything to be taught on Sundays and festival days save what refers

in some way to religion or holy living. Decrees of this sort, if they

plainly indicate the deplorable practical paganism which at that time

prevailed in most public academies, show us also that the rulers of

the Church were sensible of the evil, and earnestly desirous to apply

a suitable remedy. And, as we shall see hereafter, this very city of

Rome that seemed so corrupt, cherished in her bosom a principle of

life and power, which eventually cast out the infection which had

hung over her so long, and so accomplished her own purification. Long

before Luther had uttered the word “Reform,” it had rung through

the halls of the Lateran. The Fathers of the Council spared nothing

and dissimulated nothing; and at the opening of the ninth session,

a remarkable oration was delivered by Antonio Pucci, clerk to the

Apostolic Chamber, in which he called on the Pope to set about the

work in earnest. “Holy Father!” he exclaimed, “you desire to restore

peace to Christendom, and you do well in so desiring. But see first

that you extinguish the intestine wars of our vices, and exterior

peace will soon reappear. Behold the world! Behold the cloister!

Behold the sanctuary! Everywhere there are abuses to reform, and it

is with the house of God that we must begin.”

Yet it can be no great matter of surprise that passing strangers

did not always penetrate the distinction between the _Church_ and

the _City_ of Rome, and that the undeniable corruption of the Roman

literary circles brought ecclesiastical rulers into disrepute, and

sapped in many minds the sentiment of loyalty to the Apostolic See.

That both Erasmus and Luther carried with them from Rome fatal

impressions, which, each in his own way, turned to the detriment of

religion, is not to be doubted. Erasmus, indeed, had no cause to be

scandalised by a state of society which was exactly to his taste. He

was _fêted_ and flattered by prelates and philosophers, and in his

letters from Rome he wants words to express his raptures at those

delicious hours which he spent among libraries and academies, in

the reunions at the palace of the _divine_ Cardinal San Giorgio, or

the yet more charming assemblies in the Pope’s private chambers.

Yet, while enjoying the cup of pleasure to the full, his keen

sarcastic eye was taking the measure of all he saw, and it was on his

journey back to the north, that he beguiled his travelling fatigues

with composing his “Praise of Folly,” in which Cardinals, Popes,

and Prelates are made the subject of his most caustic gibes and

pleasantries. And this, after all, is the way of the world; it is

a lynx-eyed critic, and has ever a rigorous standard for those who

ought to be saints, and a ready condemnation for those who fall short

of it. Erasmus, who was himself worldly to the heart’s core, had yet

sense enough to feel that worldliness, however delightful, was out of

place on the threshold of the apostles, and he made other men feel it

too, with all that biting irony of which he was the master.

Luther, a man of different mould, visited Rome in a widely

different spirit. He was in the first fervour of what he considered

his religious conversion, when in 1510 he came thither full of

enthusiasm, and fell on his knees as he entered the city, to kiss the

soil watered by the blood of martyrs; though he afterwards mocked at

his own devotion and at the simplicity with which he ran about from

church to church prepared to believe and venerate everything that he

saw. He too carried away impressions that were never effaced. His

coarse, strong Saxon nature had little taste for the arts and the

_belles-lettres_, and was only repelled by the magnificence around

him. The Olympic deities that met his eye at every street corner,

the heathenish adornments of the very churches, where pictures and

images of Christian mysteries were presented in the garb of paganism,

and the yet worse heathenism which met his ears from the elegant

literary crowds among whom he passed in his coarse friar’s frock, all

this sank into his soul to be reproduced on the day when he launched

his imprecations against the seven-hilled city, and held her up to

the scorn of his countrymen, as “the dwelling-place of dragons,

the nest of bats and vultures, the resort of hobgoblins, weasels,

gnomes, and demons.”[335] Nor did it matter anything to his audience

that the enormities he exposed were far surpassed by those which he

committed, and that the apostle of reform had himself let loose on

the world the reign of frenzied license; the scandals he propagated

did the work which he intended, and indelibly fixed in the Saxon mind

the tradition which identified Rome with Babylon.

We need not here concern ourselves with the history of that great

revolution which history miscalls the Reformation. Before the death

of Leo X., that which had been deemed in its beginning to be but “a

squabble of friars,” was ending in the apostasy of nations. The Roman

academicians, however, were less moved at the tidings which reached

them in 1520, that the Pope’s Bull, the Decretals, and the Summa

of St. Thomas, had all been burnt together by Luther in the public

square of Wittemberg, and that the Pope himself had been declared

by the same authority to be Antichrist, than at another piece of

intelligence, which was communicated to them on February 9, 1522, and

which startled them like a clap of thunder. Leo was dead, and the

choice of the Cardinals had fallen on the Cardinal Adrian of Utrecht.

The burning of St. Thomas in person would have been a light matter to

them, in comparison with the election to the Papal dignity of a plain

austere Louvain professor; already known to fame as the advocate of

ecclesiastical discipline, the friend and colleague of Ximenes, and

it was more than whispered, the supporter of scholasticism. He was a

Fleming, a “Scotist,” a Goth, and the enemy of letters. He had come

into the city without pomp of any kind, and had ordered one of the

half-finished triumphal arches, that was to have cost a thousand

ducats, to be destroyed. He had discharged ninety out of the one

hundred equerries kept by his predecessor. He had brought his old

Louvain housekeeper with him to the Vatican, and was dismissing the

improvisatori and whole troops of other Court idlers. They had taken

him over the Museum attached to his palace, and he had been heard to

mutter the words _Idola antiquorum_, when standing before the group

of the Laocoon. Some of Sadolet’s most elegant Latin epistles had

been placed in his hands, and he had briefly commented on them as

“the letters of a poet.” “I verily believe,” writes Jerome Negri, in

terrible alarm, “that he will do as Pope Gregory did before him, make

a clean sweep of our libraries, and perhaps grind up our statues to

furnish mortar for building St. Peter’s.” The artists cried out that

now they should all be starved; the professors bewailed the certain

return of Gothic barbarism: Bembo set out at once for Venice, and

Sadolet retired to his bishopric of Carpentras, where he displayed

those noble qualities which had as yet found no room to expand in the

artificial atmosphere of the Court.

Never was there a more undeserved reproach than that which

stigmatised Pope Adrian as the enemy of learning. Erasmus, who

had been defended by him from the attacks of some over-zealous

scholastics, judged far otherwise, but the Romans could not forgive

his indifference to ancient art, and his condemnation of those

paganising scholars, whom he termed “Terentians.” Still less could

they forgive his plain speaking on the subject of reform. “Many

abominations,” he said, “have existed near this Holy Chair, abuses

in spiritual matters, and evil everywhere. We pledge ourselves, on

our part, to use our utmost endeavour to reform that Court which has,

perhaps, been the source of the evils we deplore.”

In his brief pontificate of twenty-two months he was unable to

accomplish the work which lay so close to his heart. His death was

regarded by the Roman literati as a kind of providence, a special

grace from heaven which had averted the return of mediæval barbarism;

and some of them went so far as to adorn with garlands the house

of his physician, to whose want of skill the fatal termination

of Adrian’s illness was ascribed, hanging over his door the

inscription--“To the Saviour of his country.”

Yet those two-and-twenty months, which seemed so fruitless, witnessed

the turning of the tide. The election of another Medici as successor

to Adrian was the signal for extraordinary rejoicings, and for the

return to Rome of many who had abandoned it after the accession of

Adrian. Clement VII. had all the personal grace and refined intellect

of his family; he had less taste for pleasure, and more aptitude for

business than Leo, and was a true lover of learned men. He induced

Sadolet to resume his functions as secretary, and did his best to

engage Erasmus to devote his genius to the earnest defence of the

Church.

The spirits of the Romans revived when they witnessed the splendid

patronage of letters exercised by the new Pope and his kinsman,

Cardinal Hyppolitus de’ Medici, who entertained in his household no

fewer than three hundred learned men. The artists and academicians

confidently reckoned on a return of their golden age; and yet all

were more or less conscious of a certain indefinable change which

had stolen over the public mind, betokening that a reaction was

setting in, and that a new era was at hand. The German revolt

from the Church had by this time assumed proportions which it was

impossible to ignore. The question of the English divorce was causing

grave inquietudes, and whilst the shadow of new and unprecedented

calamities hung heavy over the world, even the most indifferent minds

felt perhaps that something more earnest was called for at that

moment than the cultivation of the Muses. It cannot, indeed, be said

that the tide of social corruption was checked; yet another and a

better element was silently at work; and, hidden in the glittering

crowd,

Some few there were who with pure hearts aspired

To lay their just hands on the golden key

That opes the palace of eternity.

Clement had summoned to his Court several illustrious ecclesiastics

who, whilst inferior to none of their contemporaries in literary

merit, were desirous above all things to provide a remedy for those

grave domestic abuses which, they rightly felt, afflicted the

Church more heavily than any attacks from her exterior foes. Among

these were the Venetian, Gaspar Contarini, a profound scholar,

and a man of fervent piety; Sadolet, who, now greatly weaned from

the pursuits which had formerly absorbed him, desired to devote

his remaining years to his pastoral duties; Matthew Ghiberti, the

worthiest prelate of his time, whom Clement had admitted to his

closest confidence, and raised to the dignity of Chancellor and the

see of Verona; the Prothonotary, Cajetan of Thienna, and the Cardinal

Caraffa, Archbishop of Theate, who afterwards became Pope under

the title of Paul IV. The jubilee year 1525 also brought to Rome a

number of devout and earnest pilgrims, among whom was our own great

countryman Reginald Pole, then a student at Padua, whom Bembo called

the most virtuous young man in Italy, and whose happiness it was to

enter on his list of friends the name of almost every one of his

contemporaries most illustrious for scholarship or piety. Men of this

stamp felt the need, in the midst of that luxurious and enervating

atmosphere, of some tie of Christian fellowship which might support

and invigorate their spiritual life; and the result was the formation

of a humble confraternity which met in the church of SS. Silvestro

and Dorotea, and took the name of “the Oratory of Divine Love.”

Similar associations were springing up in other cities of Italy,

but that at Rome is remarkable as being the germ whence afterwards

developed the order of the Theatines. A plan was concerted among

the members of the confraternity for instituting an order of

regular clerks, in which the ancient canonical mode of life should

be revived; this being suggested as offering the surest means for

effecting that reformation of manners among the clergy which all good

men so earnestly desired to forward. This design was carried out with

the approbation of the Pope; Caraffa and St. Cajetan being chosen

the two first superiors. Of the latter it was commonly said that he

desired to reform the world without letting the world know he was

in it, and in the northern cities of Italy, where he had hitherto

chiefly resided, he had the character of uniting in one person

the seraphic gifts of a contemplative to the heroic virtues of an

apostle. The rule adopted by the regular clerks was nearly the same

as that of the ancient Canons Regular. It appears certain that their

original design included the formation of ecclesiastical seminaries,

and in all essential particulars the new foundation bore a striking

resemblance to that set on foot in the eighth century, with a very

similar purpose, by St. Chrodegang of Metz. And thus we see how

saintly men, when they took in hand the work of ecclesiastical

reform, found no better means for carrying out their views, than

turning back into the old paths, and following the traditions

bequeathed them by a golden antiquity.

The order of Theatines, however, whilst yet in its infancy, was

threatened with extinction when that terrible calamity fell upon

Rome, to describe which one needs to use the language of the

inspired writers, when they detail the woes that were to chastise

the guilty city, which was yet the chosen city of God. The political

combinations which had closely allied the Roman Pontiff with the

Court of France, exposed him to the hostility of the Emperor Charles

V., whose armies entered Italy in the early part of the year 1527,

and threatened to lay siege to Rome. On the 5th of May, the city

was stormed by the ferocious bands of the Constable de Bourbon,

consisting chiefly of German Lutherans, animated to frenzy by the

thirst for plunder and a wild religious fanaticism. The Pope took

refuge in the castle of St. Angelo, and from thence had the anguish

of witnessing his capital given up to scenes of sacrilege and

violence which find no equal in history. The sack of Rome by the

barbarian Goths lasted but six days, but the Germans held possession

of their prey for _nine months_, every hour of which witnessed some

fresh abomination. The citizens were subjected to horrible tortures,

to compel them to give up their hidden treasures; the churches were

desecrated, and sacred relics tossed about the streets; troop-horses

were stabled in the Pontifical chapel, and littered with Bulls and

decretals; mock celebrations of holy rites were performed by drunken

troopers, who, decked out with cardinals’ dresses, pretended to hold

a conclave, and proclaimed the election of Luther as Pope. Out of a

population of 85,000, 50,000 citizens are calculated to have perished

by torture and the sword, and the excesses of the soldiers at last

brought a pestilence in their train, which all but annihilated, the

conquerors themselves; so that the city, awhile before so brilliant

and luxurious, became little better than a desolate and fetid tomb.

Amid the nameless horrors of that time it is needless to say that

neither piety nor learning procured any mercy for their owners.

St. Cajetan was scourged and tortured, and then compelled with his

brethren to abandon the Roman territory and take refuge in Venice;

where their modest house a few years later afforded hospitality to

St. Ignatius and his first companions. As to the academicians, we

are assured by Jerome Negri that the very few who escaped from the

sword were dispersed into foreign lands, and that all subsequent

efforts to restore their Society on its former footing proved an

utter failure. In fact, when the city was at last delivered from the

apostate hordes that possessed her, it was only to be exposed to the

new scourges of famine, pestilence, and inundation, and during these

calamities there reappeared in her streets, not the gay bands of

artists and _literati_, but reformed Camaldolese and Capuchin friars,

whose existence in the city, says one writer, was first made known to

the Romans during the plague of 1528. Rome, indeed, recovered from

her overwhelming disasters with astonishing rapidity, and it was not

long before the Court of Clement VII. reassumed much of the brilliant

character which it had borne under Leo X. But Roman society no longer

groaned under the dictatorship of professors. The grave troubles of

the Church drew to her capital men of earnest and exalted piety, who

responded to the cry that came from every Catholic land for a General

Council that should not only vindicate the doctrine of the Church

against heretical innovators, but courageously enter on the reform

of practical abuses. Delivered by her terrible chastisement from the

meretricious splendour of a false prosperity, Rome prepared to put

on her beautiful garments as of old, and to purify herself from the

contagion which worldly men had brought into the very presence of the

sanctuary. Even whilst her enemies were counting her among the dead,

and rejoicing over her humiliation, she arose to a more beautiful

and vigorous life than ever, so that many of those whose hearts had

become estranged turned to her once more, and beholding her invested

with the majesty of ancient discipline, recognised the seven-hilled

city to be indeed “the city of truth, the mountain of the Lord of

Hosts, the sanctified mountain.”[336]

_CHAPTER XXIII._

ENGLISH SCHOLARS OF THE RENAISSANCE.

A.D. 1473 TO 1550.

The revival of polite letters in this country may be considered as

dating from the foundation of Magdalen College, in 1473. Not only

was it the most perfectly constituted college in the realm, but

its great founder had amply provided for the cultivation of humane

literature; and at the period of his death, Grocyn, the future

restorer of Greek studies at Oxford, was Divinity Professor, and

Wolsey and Colet were among his pupils. Oxford at this time presented

a spectacle which seems to have struck the imagination of all her

foreign visitors. Three hundred halls and grammar-schools, besides

her noble colleges and religious houses, furnished means of education

to a far larger number of students than resort thither at the present

time. The English universities, though admitting the new learning,

still adhered to the scholastic philosophy--a fact which formed the

groundwork of those charges brought against them by some of their

contemporaries, and re-echoed by Wood, of being behind their time.

It is not very easy to determine what was the precise state of the

English schools at the opening of the sixteenth century. On the one

hand, it is clear that the revival of classical literature found

plenty of enthusiastic supporters among English scholars; and, if we

are to draw any conclusions as to the nature of English education

of this time from Sir John Elyot’s treatise of “The Governor,” we

should be disposed to think that children of the upper classes were

then expected to begin their classical studies while still in their

cradles. A nobleman’s son, he says, should have none about him, not

even his nurses, who cannot speak pure and eloquent Latin. At the

very least, their English should be clean, polite, perfect, and

articulately pronounced, omitting no letter or syllable. At seven,

a boy is to begin his Greek and Latin grammars together; and at

twelve he is supposed to have so completely made the Latin tongue

his own that he need no more apply himself to its study, but confine

his labours to Greek. The whole treatise, which is in many respects

valuable and interesting, proves that the writer had imbibed that

tiresome form of classical enthusiasm which wears you out with its

illustrations from the ancients. Even the necessity of religion is

supported by an appeal to the examples of Romulus and Numa Pompilius,

though, accidentally, we are allowed to peep into the old Catholic

nursery, and see the children “knelyng in thir games before ymages,

and holdyng up thir litel white handes, movyng thir mouths as if they

were praieing, or going and singyng, as it were in procession.” This

treatise, published in 1531, plainly infers that at that time a noble

youth was expected to begin his studies very early, and to aim at

something more than the name of a scholar. On the other hand, there

was a certain prejudice in favour of foreign academies, which induced

those who in all ages make it their business to follow the fashion,

to undervalue Eton and Oxford, and to consider you a Goth or a rustic

if you had not graduated in some Italian university. The mediæval

spirit which still hung about the cloisters of Oxford was quite out

of harmony with the prevailing tastes; and undoubtedly those same

cloisters sheltered many worthy Conservatives of the old school who

clung to Aristotle and Oxford Latin, and thought very little of the

new-fangled Platonists.

Hence, those who desired to imbue themselves with classic literature

generally found their way to Italy, and the rage for a foreign

education had become so excessive that Barclay introduces an allusion

to it in his “Ship of Fooles:”--

One runneth to Almayne, another to France,

To Paris, Padwy, Lombardy, or Spayne,

Another to Bonony, Rome, or Orleans;

To Caen, Toulouse, Athens or Colayne;

And at the last returneth home agayne

More ignorant.

The reproach conveyed in the last line was probably deserved by some

whose foreign scholarship was only sought for fashion’s sake; but

it does not certainly apply to the knot of illustrious Englishmen

whom we find studying in the Italian schools at the close of the

fifteenth century. Among them was Richard Pace, who had been brought

up in the household of Langton, Bishop of Winchester, and had been

sent by his patron to study at Padua, where he had Latymer and

Cuthbert Tonstall for his tutors; William Linacre, who had repaired

to Florence and been received into the family of Lorenzo de’ Medici,

who, charmed with his modesty and talents, chose him for the

companion of his son’s studies: and the amiable and simple-hearted

William Lily, whose Greek learning had been acquired at Rhodes, and

who was then perfecting himself in Latin literature in the schools of

Rome and Florence. Colet also made the tour of Italy, after taking

his degree at Magdalen, and on coming back to England, he returned

a second time to Oxford, where in 1497 he found Grocyn and Linacre

delivering public lectures on Greek. Their audience was at first a

small one, for the new learning was regarded with no little jealousy

and suspicion in many quarters, and parties ran high between the

Greeks and the Trojans, as the adherents of the opposite factions

were commonly called. The Greeks expended their wit on the dulness of

their adversaries, whom they represented as “sleepy, surly fellows,

who talked bad Latin, and never said a smart or clever thing;”

whilst the Trojans denounced their brilliant rivals as dangerous

innovators. The truth lay pretty evenly between the two parties.

The Oxford studies were possibly in some respects behind the time,

and not merely profane, but sacred learning also appears, from

Wood’s account, to have been at a low ebb; and for this, as has been

elsewhere shown, the lawyers and the logicians, the Lollards and the

Anti-Roman party, must share the blame among them. Still, when we

remember the enthusiasm with which men like More and Erasmus regarded

the English universities, it is difficult to believe that sound and

solid learning can have been entirely wanting at Oxford,[337] and

considering what sort of clouds hung on the horizon, the “Scotists,”

perhaps, did not show themselves such dull fellows after all, when

they warned their disciples to keep clear of foreign fashions, and

set afloat the well-known proverb, “Let the Greeks beware of heresy.”

Colet did not hesitate to join the party of the Greeks, and to this

he was moved not merely by a love of polite literature, but by the

contempt and aversion which he had conceived for the scholastic

philosophy. At Florence he had not only attended the Greek lectures

of Politian and Demetrius Chalycondylus, but he had listened to the

preaching of Savonarola, from whom he had caught an enthusiasm for

Scriptural studies, and a burning zeal for the reform of abuses.

So soon, therefore, as he had been ordained deacon he flung aside

the Master of the Sentences, and began to read public lectures on

the Epistles of St. Paul, though with characteristic temper he had

disdained to receive any degrees in Divinity, accounting the studies

which he should have had to engage in for that purpose as wholly

empty and unprofitable. His earnest eloquence and original mode of

treatment drew him more hearers than the classic erudition of Grocyn

had been able to command, and there was not a doctor of law or

divinity in the whole university, but gladly came to hear the young

preacher, bringing their books with them.

It was at this moment that Erasmus paid his first visit to England,

having been invited over by Lord Mountjoy, his former pupil at Paris.

Erasmus at this time supported himself partly by his tutorships, and

partly by the pensions which he received from the sovereigns who

sought to attach him to their Courts, and from the learned friends

whose pecuniary assistance he availed himself of with considerable

freedom. At Oxford he was received into St. Mary’s Priory by the

kind-hearted Prior Charnock, and in his letters expresses the

singular delight which he felt at all he heard and all he saw. He

soon made acquaintance with Colet, and was by him introduced to More,

then studying at Magdalen, and to Wolsey, bursar of the same college;

and in company with these new friends (he wrote to Mountjoy) he would

be content to live all his days in the farthest extremity of Scythia.

In short, he drew so brilliant a picture of the pleasant hours they

spent in one another’s company, that Mountjoy, who was but just

married, could not resist the temptation of running down to Oxford,

and beginning a fresh course of study under his old master.

The friendship that sprang up from that time between Erasmus and

Colet was strong and enduring. Yet no two men could be more unlike

in their real character, however much their literary tastes may

have coincided. Colet was heart and soul in earnest, and herein lay

the strength and nobleness of a disposition which, as his friend

owns, had in it many a dash of human infirmity. “When he speaks,”

writes Erasmus, “you would think he was more than man: it is not

with voice alone, but with eyes, and countenance, and with his whole

demeanour.” He was of a hot and haughty spirit, and impatient of

the least affront, qualities which imparted a certain harshness and

vehemence to all his words and actions. Yet he had (and who has

not?) his softer side, and the stern and fiery orator, as rigid and

severe to himself as he was to others, was a lover of children, and

delighted to make himself little with little ones, whom he compared

to the angels, though, as we shall presently see, his love even of

them was somewhat lacking in tenderness. Erasmus himself was not

likely to be led into the excesses to which a nature like Colet’s

easily betrays itself. There was no real earnestness about him. Had

he not left his Epistles behind him, we might be amazed that one so

deficient in every sterling quality of soul could have found a way to

the hearts of all with whom he associated. But his letters explain

the mystery. There was no resisting the charm of his wit, and his

extraordinary gift of treating every subject on which he touched in

the way that was most agreeable. After the lapse of three hundred

years, the reader, who possesses nothing but the dead written letter

of that graceful eloquence, feels its indescribable magic, the

“certain Erasmianism,” as Colet calls it, and is carried away against

his will by the bewitching pleasantry of a writer whose whole life

he knows to have been contemptible. There was, moreover, one most

attractive quality which he shared with More: nothing was able to

ruffle his temper; and he had the happiest ways of restraining the

sallies of his more fiery companions, and preventing their table talk

after dinner from ever ending in a quarrel. Thus, on one occasion,

when a disputation had arisen upon the sin of Cain, Erasmus, who

judged by Colet’s sparkling eyes that the conversation had lasted

long enough, and wished to end it, invented on the spot a story from

some pretended ancient author, by which ingenious fraud the argument

was broken off, and the company parted in the best of humours. He

was moreover an advocate for moderation in all things, even in

hostility to the scholastics, and once took up the defence of St.

Thomas against the attacks of Colet, and represented that the Angelic

doctor really did seem to have studied the Scriptures. But this time

Colet bore him down, and could not contain his impatience at hearing

a word said in favour of one whose dogmatic definitions of theology

he hesitated not to accuse of arrogance. More held an equal place in

the affections of both his friends; he had all the wit of Erasmus

without his flippancy, and all the earnestness of Colet without his

asperity of temper. He chose the latter as his director, and learnt

from him a singular love for the inspired writings, and many precious

secrets of self-mastery and mortification; but he had some spiritual

instincts to which Colet was an utter stranger; and while the one was

venting his annoyance at what he deemed the childish superstitions

of the Canterbury pilgrims, as he watched them crowding to kiss

the relics of St. Thomas à Becket, the other, with truer humility,

thought it not beneath the character of a man of letters to feed his

faith at the homely springs of popular devotion, and visited many an

old English shrine on foot--a rare thing in those days, when even the

common people went on horse-back.

We will pass over a few years, which brought their usual changes

to the Oxford friends in all save the mutual regard which they

bore for one another. The princely boy to whom Erasmus had first

been introduced in his schoolroom, and who had won his heart by

challenging him to reply to a Latin epistle, was now on the throne,

“tall in body, and mighty in will,” says Stow, “and so prosperous

in his kingdom, that it was called ‘The Golden Realm.’” Wolsey,

whom we left a Demy of Magdalen, was now Cardinal, and had just

succeeded Warham as chancellor, having the learned Richard Pace for

his secretary. The European politics which he sought to guide had not

made him neglect the cause of letters:--

“Witness for him

Those twins of learning which he raised in you,

Ipswich and Oxford!”

Good Bishop Fisher was hard at work introducing Greek studies at

Cambridge, where Croke was delivering lectures, and where the

new learning was better received than it had been at Oxford. The

noble Countess of Richmond[338] had founded her two Cambridge

colleges, her grammar-school at Wimbourne, and her “Lady Margaret”

professorships; Fox, now Bishop of Winchester, was drawing up the

statutes of Corpus Christi, that classical beehive, as he was pleased

to term it, in which he provided for the study of Latin, Greek, and

Hebrew, under the professors or “herbalists,” who were for ever to

drive all barbarism out of the bee-garden, and provide that the best

classical authors should be read by his students. Linacre was now the

royal physician and a man of importance; he had translated Galen,

founded two lectureships at Oxford, and the College of Physicians,

but at this moment he was contemplating whether it might not be well

to give up professional fame and Court favour, in order to die a

priest; and this design he afterwards executed. Grocyn, too, had ably

maintained his scholar’s reputation, and was universally respected

as long as he lived, says Erasmus, for his chaste and holy life. In

the judgment of that critic, however, his firm adherence to Catholic

dogma was somewhat excessive, and bordered on superstition, and he

considers it necessary to apologise for this weakness on the part

of his friend, who, he says, had from childhood been trained in

the scholastic theology, and was exceedingly learned in questions

of ecclesiastical discipline. More, whose early inclination for

the cloister had yielded to the persuasions of his director Colet,

had married and embraced a professional career; he had written

his Utopia, and was struggling hard to preserve his independence,

and keep out of the royal service, into which others so eagerly

sought admittance. He desired nothing better than to be suffered to

enjoy in freedom his happy Chelsea home, where it was his delight

to direct the education of his children, to gather around him his

learned friends, and relieve the intervals of business with polite

and Christian studies. In that family circle Erasmus always found

a place during his visits to England, and it is to him that we owe

the charming portraiture of a household, the venerable memory of

which has sunk into the English heart and become almost the typical

example of an English home. As to Erasmus himself, his course during

the same period is easily told: he had published his Greek Testament

and his learned editions of the Fathers, and had thereby earned a

European reputation; he had flitted about from England to Paris, from

Paris to Germany, from Germany back again to England, and thence

to Rome. Courted, flattered, and admired by all, he was the great

_bel-esprit_ of the day, and the lighter productions of his pen were

telling upon public opinion, much perhaps in the same sort of way

that clever journalism affects it in our own day. He was directing

his keen powers of ridicule against some real abuses, but at the

same time his mocking wit was recklessly striking at sacred things

and bringing them into popular contempt. In his “Praise of Folly,”

and his “Adages,” he had hit hard at popes, cardinals, pilgrimages,

devotions to the saints, and indulgences, but above all at monks and

friars, whom he invariably holds up to execration, as something too

pitiably vile and puerile to be endured by men of sense. In short, to

use the oft-quoted saying, he had laid the egg which Luther was to

hatch, and though he afterwards resented this charge, and was wont to

say that he had laid a hen’s egg, and Luther had hatched it a crow’s,

yet, as Hallam has shrewdly remarked, whatever were the bird, it

pecked hard against the Church and her religious orders. His mode of

warfare was to paint every one who opened his lips in defence of the

old order of things as a half-witted ignoramus, and to bespatter his

adversaries with epithets and witticisms, in an easy flowing style

which everybody read and everybody laughed at; and when the laugh was

once raised the victory was more than half won.

It remains to speak of Colet, now Dean of St. Paul’s, who had

steadily followed out the purpose to which he had devoted himself at

Oxford, had given himself up heart and soul to the task of reviving

the study of Scriptural Divinity, and was opposing himself like a

rock to every form of practical corruption. At this distance of time

it is not easy for us to satisfy ourselves as to the real character

of one who has left nothing but his fame behind him, and whose views

and teaching are to be gathered, not from his own writings but

from the epistolary correspondence of Erasmus, whose narrative is

naturally coloured by the bias of his own mind.[339] In those days of

Court sycophancy, we cannot but admire the courageous independence of

such a man, and the single-hearted fervour with which he set himself

to reform his chapter, to expound the gospel to the people, and to

urge upon his fellow clergy a strict observance of the canons. In

his sermon preached before Convocation, in 1511, he chose for his

text the words of St. Paul: “Be ye not conformed to this world;” and

thundered out in plain, strong, and noble words his denunciation

of those abuses which he called the “matter of the Church’s

reformation;” such as “the worldly lives of the prelates,” “their

hunting and hawking,” and “their covetousness after high promotions.”

The reformation he said must begin with my “reverend Fathers the

Lord Bishops,” whom he prayed to excuse his boldness, for he spoke

out of very zeal for Holy Church. In this famous sermon there is

doubtless something too much of asperity, yet it does not seem to

have been taken amiss. The single-hearted honesty of the speaker was

understood and appreciated by his hearers; and it must be added that

his own example added force to his words. Colet was a man of pure and

blameless life, simple and austere in manners, and ready to spend

himself for what he deemed the cause of Christ. His exhortations had

extraordinary success; other ecclesiastics were animated to greater

zeal in the discharge of their pastoral duties, and began to preach

to their people on sermons and festival days. Divinity lectures,

too, were delivered in the church of St. Paul, both by the Dean, and

certain learned men whom he invited to assist him, and these lectures

were no longer permitted to take the form of dry disputations,

but were chiefly commentaries on the Scriptures, particularly on

the Epistles of St. Paul, with which Colet was so enamoured, says

Erasmus, that he seemed to be wholly wrapped up in them. With all

his classical tastes he thought less of manner than of matter, in

his public orations. Scriptural simplicity was what he aimed at; he

wanted, to use his own rather uncourteous phrase, to “clear away the

cobwebs of the schoolmen from the plain text of the Bible.” He did

not altogether neglect the study of style, and sometimes condescended

to read Chaucer and other English poets for the purpose of improving

his diction. But in general his thoughts came out too hot and molten

for him to deliberate much in what words to utter them, and the

careful polish which Erasmus bestowed on his writings was viewed by

him as more worthy of a pedagogue than of a preacher, who has his

heart full of big thoughts and is in haste to utter them.