Selections from Erasmus | Page 3

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 of Rochester, sent him to Cambridge and gave him rooms in Queens' College. For a time he held the Professorship of Divinity founded in Cambridge, as in Oxford, by the Lady Margaret Tudor, mother of Henry VII. But teaching was not his gift. Others might inspire students from the teacher's chair: his talent could only enlighten the teacher through his books.
At length the time came to publish. By fortunate accident, if