Selections from Erasmus | Page 3

stipend to a University. He
went to Paris and began reading for a Doctor's degree in Theology. But
the course was too cramping, and he therefore used his opportunity to
educate himself more widely; eking out the Bishop's grant by taking
pupils. It was a hard life, and his health was delicate; but he did not
flinch from his task, doing just enough paid work--and no more--to
keep himself alive and to buy books. In 1499 one of his pupils, a young
Englishman, Lord Mountjoy, brought him to England for a visit, and in
the autumn sent him for a month or two to Oxford. There he fell in with
Colet, a man of strong character and intellect, who was giving a new
impulse to the study of the Bible by historical treatment. Colet's
enthusiasm encouraged Erasmus in the direction to which he was
already inclined; and when he returned to Paris in 1500, it was with the
determination to apply his whole energy to classical learning, and
especially to the study of Theology, which in the new world opening
before him was still to be the queen of sciences. For the next four years
he was working hard, teaching himself Greek and reading whatever he
could find, at Paris or, when the plague drove him thence, at Orleans or
Louvain. By 1504 his period of preparation was over, and the fruitful
season succeeded. His first venture in Theology was to print in 1505
some annotations on the New Testament by Lorenzo Valla, an Italian
humanist of the fifteenth century with whose critical temperament he
was much in sympathy.
Shortly afterwards a visit to England brought him what he had long
desired--an opportunity of going to Italy. He set out in June 1506, as
supervisor of the studies of two boys, the sons of Henry VII's physician.
After taking the degree of D.D. at Turin in September he settled down
at Bologna with his charges and worked at a book which he had had in
hand for some years, and of which he had already published a specimen

in 1500. To this book, the Adagia, he owed the great fame which he
obtained throughout Europe, before any of the works on which his
reputation now rests had been published. Its scheme was a collection of
proverbial sayings and allusions, which he illustrated and explained in
such a way as to make them useful to those who desired to study the
classics and to write elegant Latin. In these days of lexicons and
dictionaries the value of the Adagia has passed away; but to an age
which placed a high value on Latinity and which had little apparatus to
use, the book was a great acquisition. It was welcomed with enthusiasm
when Aldus published it at Venice in 1508: and throughout his life
Erasmus brought out edition after edition, amplifying and enlarging a
book which the public was always ready to buy.
From Venice Erasmus went on to Rome, where he had a flattering
reception, and, though a northerner, was recognized as an equal by the
humanists of Italy. He was pressed to stay, but the death of Henry VII
brought him an invitation to return to England, in the names of
Warham, Archbishop of Canterbury, and his old patron Mountjoy, who
was loud in his praises of the 'divine' young king.
As he rode hastily northwards, his active brain fell to composing a
satire on the life he saw around him. He was a quick observer, and his
personal charm had won him admission to the halls of the great; whilst
bitter experience had shown him the life of the poor and needy. His
satire, The Praise of Folly, cuts with no gentle hand into the deceits to
which human frailty is prone and lays bare their nakedness. High and
low, rich and poor, suffer alike, as Folly makes merry over them. There
was much in the life of the age which called for censure, as there had
been in the past and was to be in the future. On untrained lips censure
easily degenerates into abuse and loses its sting: Erasmus with his gifts
of humour and expression caught the public ear and set men thinking.
In England, where he spent the next years, 1509-14, Erasmus began the
great work of his life, an edition of the New Testament and of the
Letters of Jerome. His time was spent between Cambridge and London,
and his friends did what they could for his support. Warham presented
him with a living--Aldington in Kent--and then as Erasmus could not
reside and discharge the duties of a parish priest, allowed him to resign
and draw a pension from the living--in violation of his own strict
regulation. Mountjoy gave him another pension, and Fisher, Bishop