The Age of Erasmus by P. S. Allen

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

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

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

In the last half of the fifteenth century there had been a beginning
of Greek in Oxford. Thomas Chandler, Warden of New College, 1454-75,
had some knowledge of it; and under his auspices an Italian adventurer
of no merit, Cornelio Vitelli, came and taught here for a short time.
For about two years, 1491-3, Grocin returned to lecture on Greek, as
the result of his Italian studies. Colet was here about 1497-1505,
until he became Dean of St. Paul's; but his lectures, as we have said,
were on the Vulgate, not the Greek Testament. Of the rest that shadowy
and fugitive scholar, William Latimer, was the only one of this band
of Oxonians who definitely came back to live and work in the
University; and he perhaps did not cast in his lot here until 1513.
When he did return, he was not to be torn away again from his rooms at
All Souls, under the shadow of St. Mary's tower. In 1516 More and
Erasmus wished him to come and teach Greek to Fisher, Bishop of
Rochester; but could not prevail with him. It would seem strange
to-day for an Oxford scholar to be invited to become private tutor to
the Chancellor of the sister University: he would probably shrink, as
Latimer did, and find refuge in excuses. For eight or nine years,
Latimer said, his studies had led him elsewhere, and he had not
touched Latin and Greek. For the same reason he declared himself
unable to help Erasmus in preparing for the second edition of his New
Testament. What these studies were is nowhere told--Latimer's only
printed work is two letters, one a mere note to Aldus, the other a
long letter to Erasmus--but there is some reason to suppose that they
were musical. He urged, too, that it was useless to hope the Bishop
could make much progress in a month or two with such a language as
Greek, over which Grocin had spent two years in Italy, and Linacre,
Latimer, and Erasmus himself had laboured for many years: it would be
much better to send to Italy for some one who could reside for a long
time in the Bishop's household.

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

At the time of Erasmus' first visit to England, 1499, London was far
more a centre of the new intellectual life than either Oxford or
Cambridge. He rejoiced in his first meeting with Colet, and in their
walks in Oxford gardens in the soft October sunshine; his Prior at St.
Mary's was benign and helpful; and he found a young compatriot, John
Sixtin, of Bolsward in East Friesland, studying law, and engaged with
him in a contest of that arid elegance which the taste of the age
still demanded. But in London he found Grocin at his City living,
ready to lend him books, and perhaps already contemplating those
lectures delivered two years later, on the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy of
Dionysius, which brought him to such a surprising conclusion--a denial
of the attribution of them to Dionysius the Areopagite, which in
agreement with Colet he had set out to prove. In London was Linacre,
just returned from Venice, full of Aldus' Greek Aristotle; to a
supplementary volume of which he had sent a translation of Proclus'
Sphere, a mathematical work then highly esteemed. He had been working
on Aristotelian commentators, and was soon to lecture on the
_Meteorologica_--a course which More, who was working for the Bar in
London, attended. More himself not long afterwards lectured publicly
in London on Augustine's _de Ciuitate Dei_, also a favourite work with
the humanists. William Lily, returned from his pilgrimage, was at work
perhaps already as a schoolmaster in London; and vying with More in
translating the Greek Anthology into Latin elegiacs. Bernard Andreas,
the blind poet of Toulouse, after trying his fortune in vain at
Oxford, had insinuated himself into Henry VII's confidence, and was
now attached to the court as tutor to Prince Arthur--an office from
which Linacre attempted unsuccessfully to oust him--and busy with his
history of the king's reign: a project which enjoyed royal favour, and
was the forerunner of Polydore Vergil's creditable essay towards a
critical history of England.

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

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

You will remember that the Lady of Veere was named Anne of Borsselen.
A letter of Erasmus to her begins: 'Three Annas were known to the
ancients; the sister of Dido, whom the Muses of the Romans have
consecrated to immortality; the wife of Elkanah, with whose praises
Jewish records resound; and the mother of the Virgin, who is the
object of Christian worship. Would that my poor talents might avail,
that posterity may know of your piety and snow-white purity, and count
you the fourth member of this glorious band! It was no mere chance
that conferred upon you this name, making your likeness to them
complete. Were they noble? So are you. Did they excel in piety? Yours,
too, redounds to heaven. Were they steadfast in affliction? Alas that
here, too, you are constrained to resemble them. Yet in my sorrow
comfort comes from this thought, that God sends suffering to bring
strength. Affliction it was that made the courage of Hercules, of
Aeneas, of Ulysses shine forth, that proved the patience of Job.'
This, of course, is only a brief epitome. After a great deal more in
this strain, he concludes: 'I send you a poem to St. Anne and some
prayers to address to the Virgin. She is ever ready to hear the
prayers of virgins, and you I count not a widow, but a virgin. That
when only a child you consented to marry, was mere deference to the
bidding of your parents and the future of your race; and your wedded
life was a model of patience. That now, when still no more than a
girl, you repel so many suitors is further proof of your maiden heart.
If, as I confidently presage, you persevere in this high course, I
shall count you not amongst the virgins of Scripture innumerable, not
amongst the eighty concubines of Solomon, but, with (I am sure) the
approval of Jerome, among the fifty queens.'

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

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

V

ERASMUS' LIFE-WORK

In August 1511 Erasmus returned to Cambridge. He was a different man
from the young scholar who had determined twelve years before that it
was no use for him to stay in Oxford. In the interval he had learnt
what he wanted--Greek; he had had his desire and visited Italy; and
now he came back to sit down to steady work, in accordance with his
promise to Colet, in accordance with the purpose of his life, to
advance the study of the Scriptures and the knowledge of God. It had
been no light matter to learn Greek. Books were not abundant, and the
only teacher to be had, Hermonymus of Sparta, was useless to him,
neither could nor would impart the classical Greek that scholars
wanted. So Erasmus was compelled to fall back on the best of all
methods, to teach himself. He had no Liddell and Scott, no Stephanus;
probably nothing better than a manuscript vocabulary copied from some
earlier scholar, and amplified by himself. No wonder that he found
Homer difficult and skipped over Lucian's long words. He exercised
himself in translation, from Lucian, from Libanius, from Euripides.
But that ready method of acquiring a new language--through the New
Testament, was probably not open to him, for copies of the Gospels in
Greek were rare, and not within the reach of a needy scholar's purse.
However, he persevered, and at length he was satisfied. He never
attained to Budaeus' mastery of Greek, but he had acquired a working
knowledge which carried him as far as he wished to go.

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

Where this work was done, Erasmus does not specifically state. One
passage gives the impression that he had made his new collections in
England; but as one reason for his dissatisfaction with the first
edition was the absence of citations from the Greek, it seems more
probable that he really wrote the new book in Aldus' house at Venice.
There, surrounded by the scholars of the New Academy, Egnatius,
Carteromachus, Aleander, Urban of Belluno, besides Aldus himself and
his father-in-law Asulanus, having at hand all the wealth of the
Aldine Greek editions and the Greek manuscripts which were sent from
far and near to be printed, Erasmus was thoroughly equipped to
transform his quarto into folio, his hundreds into thousands. He tells
us that the compositors printed as he wrote, and that he had hard work
to keep pace with them. Some of his rough manuscripts--written rapidly
in his smooth hand and flowing sentences--survive still to help us
picture the scene. It is remarkable how little correction there is.
Here and there a whole page is drawn straight through, to be
rewritten, or a passage is inserted in the neat margin; but there is
little botching, little mending of words or transposing of phrases,
such as make the rough work of other humanists difficult reading. As
he wished the sentences to run, so they flowed on to his pages, and so
they actually were printed.

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

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

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

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

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

To the New Testament--the other work which occupied his time at
Cambridge--he had also turned his attention shortly after his return
to Paris in 1500, beginning a commentary on the Epistles of St. Paul.
At the first start he wrote four volumes of it, but then for some
reason threw it aside, and never completed it, though his mind
recurred to it at intervals; and on one occasion after a fall from his
horse, in which he injured his spine, he vowed to St. Paul that he
would finish it, if he recovered. Probably he felt that his vow was
redeemed by his Paraphrases of the New Testament, which he wrote a few
years later, beginning with St. Paul, and completing the Epistles
before he undertook the Gospels.

His next work on the New Testament came to him at Louvain in 1504.
Walking out one day to the Abbey of Parc, outside the town--a house of
White Canons, Erasmus himself being a Black--he came upon a manuscript
in their library, the Annotations of Valla on the New Testament. There
was an affinity between his mind and that of the famous scholar-canon
of St. John Lateran, who, in spite of his dependence on Papal
patronage and favour, had been unable to keep his tongue from asking
awkward questions, from inquiring even into the authenticity of the
Donation of Constantine. Erasmus read the Annotations and liked their
critical, scholarly tone, and the frequent citations of the original
Greek. With the characteristic generosity of the age he was allowed to
carry the manuscript away and print it in Paris, with a dedication to
an Englishman, Christopher Fisher, perhaps a kinsman of the Bishop of
Rochester.

From Paris he wrote to Colet to report progress, saying that he had
learnt Greek and was ready to turn to the Scriptures, and asking him
to interest English patrons in their common work. By this time Colet
himself had become a patron, having been appointed Dean of St. Paul's.
It is therefore not surprising to find that within a year Erasmus was
established in London, living in a bishop's house, endowed by his old
pupil Lord Mountjoy, and rejoicing in the society of the learned
friends gathered in the capital. Chief among these was Colet, who lent
him manuscripts from the Chapter Library of St. Paul's, and provided a
copyist to write out the fruits of his labours, a one-eyed Brabantine,
Peter Meghen by name, who acted also as Colet's private
letter-carrier. Meghen wrote a bold, well-marked hand, which is easily
recognizable, and in consequence his work has been traced in many
libraries. The British Museum has a treatise of Chrysostom, translated
by Selling, and written by Meghen for Urswick, afterwards Dean of
Windsor and Rector of Hackney, to present to Prior Goldstone of
Canterbury. (Urswick was frequently sent on embassies, and had
doubtless enjoyed the hospitality of Christchurch on his way between
London and Dover.) At Wells there are a Psalter and a translation of
Chrysostom on St. Matthew, which Urswick, as executor to Sir John
Huddelston, knight, caused Meghen to write in 1514 for presentation to
the Cistercians of Hailes, in Gloucestershire. The Bodleian has a
treatise written by him in 1528 for Nicholas Kratzer to present to
Henry VIII; and Wolsey's Lectionary at Christ Church, Oxford, is
probably in Meghen's hand.

But what concern us here are some manuscripts in the British Museum
and the University Library at Cambridge, written by Meghen in 1506 and
1509 at Colet's order for presentation to his father, Sir Henry Colet,
Lord Mayor of London, and containing in parallel columns the Vulgate
and another Latin translation of the New Testament, 'per D. Erasmum
Roterodamum'. Part and possibly all of this work was done by Erasmus,
therefore, during this second residence in England in 1505-6. He tells
us that he received two Latin manuscripts from Colet, which he found
exceedingly difficult to decipher; but one cannot make a new
translation from the Latin. To the Greek manuscripts used on this
occasion he gives no clue.

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