PART IL chy of Diony the most unpardonable offence of all, in the eyes of the CHAP. V. majority of contemporary theologians, was probably the open countenance he gave to that bold heresy of the coldly critical Grocyn, respecting the authenticity of the Hierarchy of The HierarDionysius. Almost alone amid the accepted oracles of the sius. Middle Ages, that plausible forgery, with its half mystic, half Platonic tone, and glowing speculations, inspired the student with a rapture and an ecstasy which the passionless doctrinale of the schoolmen could never awaken, and of this too, the merciless critic demanded the total sacrifice! It is true that there were some of these views which Erasmus had not as yet put forth, beyond recall, through the press; but it is in every way probable that they were already perceptibly foreshadowed by his tone and conversation; and, if so, we can hardly doubt that, throughout the latter part of his residence at Cambridge, he must have been conscious of a surrounding atmosphere of dislike and suspicion; while it is evident that his sojourn was, in many respects, an irritating and depressing experience. Disappointed in his main object, he was little disposed to take a favorable view of minor matters. He professed to be scandalized at a university where a decent amanuensis could not be met with at any price'. He disliked the winter fogs2; he His Camgrumbled sadly over the college ale, which aggravated his ences of a trycomplaint, and was always writing to the goodnatured Ammonius for another cask of Greek wine. Unable, from his ignorance of their language, to converse with the townspeople, he probably misunderstood them, and, being in turn misinterpreted, encountered frequent annoyances, which led him to denounce them as boorish and malevolent in the mum arbitror. Paucula tantum annotavi, sed insigniter absurda, quo nimirum cautiores redderem eos, qui hujusmodi scriptores summa fiducia nullo judicio legunt.' Ibid. III 128. 1 Et hic (O Academiam!), nullus inveniri potest, qui ullo pretio vel mediocriter seribat.' Ibid. 1 120. 2Nam hic æstivare malim quam hibernare.' Ibid. 111 112. 3 -'pro vino bibimus vappam, et si quid vappa deterins.' (Ibid. I 105.) Cervisia hujus loci mihi nullo modo placet, nec admodum satisfaciunt vini; si possis efficere ut uter aliquis vini Græcanici, quantum potest optimi, huc deportetur, plane bearis Erasmum tuum, sed quod alienum sit a dulcedine,' Ibid. III 108. bridge experi ing character. Minor sources of dis CHAP. V. extreme'. When accordingly he took exercise, he seems to PART I have contented himself either with pacing up and down the long walk which skirts the grounds of Queens' College on the other side of the river', or else he mounted the white horse with which Ammonius had generously presented him, and rode round and round the Market-hills. Many a friar in black or in grey, darted, we may be sure, far from friendly glances at the dreaded satirist of his order. Many a staunch conservative eyed askance the foreign scholar, who had come to turn his little university world upside down. Even from satisfaction. the community of his own order at Barnwell, he received no such flattering attentions as had been paid him by prior Charnock at Oxford; and there were probably not a few of the members who thought it was quite time that their truant brother was back at Stein. With ordinary prudence, his income must have more than sufficed for his wants; he received from his professorship over thirteen pounds annually; he had been presented by Warham to the rectory of Aldington in Kent; and, though non-resident, he drew from thence an income of twenty pounds, to which the archbishop, with his usual liberality, added another twenty from his own purse. To these sums we must add an annual pension of a hundred florins from Fisher, and a second pension, which he still continued to receive, from his generous friend, lord Mountjoy. His total income, therefore, 1 'Nisi vulgus Cantabrigiense inhospitales Britannos antecedit, qui cum summa rusticitate summam malitiam conjunxere.' (Quoted by Fuller). 2 Wright and Jones, Queens' College, p. 14. 3 Ascham, English Works (ed. Bennett), p. 77. 4 An exception to Warham's practice, and a deviation from Erasmus's principles, honorable, under the circumstances, to both. See Knight, pp. 158-60. 5 Jortin, 1 56; Knight, p. 159; Opera, III 1528-9. The statements in the text are, of course, made under the supposition that these sums were actually paid and that the recipient was not too heavily mulcted by those through whose hands the moneys passed. In a letter written some seventeen years later, he says:--E duabus Angliæ pensionibus debentur quotannis plus minus ducenti floreni, sed ea pecunia ad me pervenit accisa, nonnunquam usque ad quartam partem, interdum et intercipitur.' III 1292. He was however one of the few foreigners who in the heavy tax imposed on the clergy in 1522 was allowed to pay 'only as natives did.' Burnet-Pocock, 1 53. To the notice of those who hold up this age to our admiration, as one of rough but honest virtues, I would commend the fact that, at no period in our national PART II. niary circumstances. could scarcely have been less than £700 in English money of CHAP. V. the present day; but Erasmus was no economist, and his literary labours involved a considerable outlay; notwith-spee standing therefore these liberal aids, he was always pestering Ammonius for further loans, as he preferred to call them,though he appears to have taken a flat refusal with perfect good temper. An acute attack of his chronic complaint completed the long list of his misfortunes. last Cam Nov. 1513. At last the plague, which had long been hovering in the distance, again made its appearance at Cambridge'. The university sought safety in flight, and Erasmus was left almost alone. It was then that, in his last Cambridge letter Erasmus's to Ammonius, he gave full vent to his distress and despon- bridge letter, dency. For some months past,' he writes, 'I have been living the life of a snail in its shell, stowing myself away in college, and perfectly mum over my books. The university is a solitude; most are away through fear of the plague, though even when all are here, I find but little society. The expense is past enduring; the gain, not a farthing. Believe me, as though I were on my oath it is not five months since I came back and I have spent sixty nobles, while I have received only one from my pupils, and that not without much protesting and declining on my part. I have decided not to leave a stone unturned this winter, and in fact to throw out my sheet-anchor. If this succeeds, I will build my nest here; if otherwise, I shall wing my flight,-whither I know not'.' history, - not even after the Restoration, have we more frequent evidence of contemptible swindling and corrupt practices pervading all classes. 1 In consequence of this, a grace had already been passed for dispensing with the ordinary lectures, and those in divinity and sophistry, until the feast of St Leonard's. Baker, MSS. XXXIII 173; Cooper, Annals, I 295. 2 Nos, mi Ammoni, jam menses aliquot plane cochleæ vitam vivimus, domi contracti conditique mussamus in studiis. Magua hic solitudo: absunt pestilentiæ metu plerique, quanquam quum adsunt universi, tum quoque solitudo est. Sumptus Si CHIAP. V. The last glimpse of Erasmus at Such then is the final glimpse that we gain of Erasmus at Cambridge:-it is that of a solitary, isolated scholar, prematurely old with anxiety and toil, weighed down by Cambridge. physical suffering, dejected by disappointment, and oppressed with debt; rarely venturing beyond the college gates, and then only to encounter hostile or indifferent glances; while all around there waited for him an invisible foe,—the pestilence that walketh at noon-day; often by night, in his study high up in the south-west tower, 'out watching the Bear' over the page of St. Jerome, even as Jerome himself had outwatched it many a night, when transcribing the same pages in his Bethlehem cell, some eleven hundred years before. Then winter came on, and, towards the close of each shortening day, Erasmus could mark from his window the white fogs rolling in from the surrounding marshes, reminding him of the climate he most of all disliked,-the climate of his native Holland; while day after day, the sound of footsteps, in the courts below, grew rarer and rarer. At last the gloom, the solitude, the discomfort, and the panic, became more than he could bear; and, one night, the customary lamp no longer gleamed from a certain casement in the south-west tower. And when the fear of the plague was over, and the university returned, it was known that Erasmus had left Cambridge; and no doubt many a sturdy defender of the old learning said he was very glad to hear it, and heartily hoped that all this stir about Greek, and St. Jerome, and errors in the Vulgate, was at an end. It would be obviously unjust to interpret the hasty expressions used by Erasmus, when embittered by a sense of 28, 1511, and the reply of Ammonius Latin verse, and to the great amusement of both scholars had made the first syllable in pullulare short. By the expression, quod huc me contuli, Erasmus must therefore refer to his return after one of his journeys to London, which he appears to have visited more than once during his residence at Cambridge; I have accordingly translated the words agreeably to this sense. PART I. mony of E favour of sity. failure and in perplexity as to his future course, as his CHAP. V. deliberate estimate of a university which, in reality, afforded him far more substantial aid than he received from any other learned body throughout his whole life; and the following passages from subsequent letters may fairly be regarded as altogether outweighing his peevish complaints to Ammonius. 'There are there,' he says, speaking of Cambridge in counter testia letter to Servatius, written in the same year that he left rasmus in the university, 'colleges of such devoutness of spirit, such sanc- Cambridge. tity of life, that were you yourself a witness thereof the comparison would make you ready to despise the houses of the religious orders'. In a letter, written some seven years Progress in theology at later, to Everard, the stadtholder of Holland, he declares that the univer sound theology is flourishing at Paris and at Cambridge more than at any other university. 'And whence,' he says, is this? Simply because these two universities are adapting themselves to the tendencies of the age, and receive the new learning, which is ready, if need be, to storm an entrance,not as an enemy but courteously as a guest. And again, in a third letter, to the archbishop of Toledo, written in his His praise of sixty-fourth year, when his recollections of Cambridge must leges. have begun to grow dim, he yet recalls with special delight 'those three colleges, where youth were exercised, not in dialectical wrestling matches, which serve only to chill the heart and unfit men for serious duties, but in true learning and sober arguments; and from whence they went forth to preach the word of God with earnestness and in an evangelical spirit, and to commend it to the minds of men of learning by a weighty eloquence". 1 Sunt hic collegia, in quibus tantum est religionis, tanta vitæ modestia, ut nullam religionem eis præ hac non contempturus, si videas.' Opera, ш 1529. 2Lutetiæ Cantabrigiæque sic floret theologiæ studium, ut nunquam alias æque. Quid in causa? Nimirum quod sese accommodant seculo alio se flectenti, quod has meliores litteras, vel vi irrumpere conantes, non repellunt ut hostes, sed ut hospites comiter amplectuntur.' Ibid. 111 677. 3_ -'in quibus non ea tradantur quæ juvenes ad sophisticas palæstras instruant, ad serias functiones frigidos reddant et ineptos, sed unde prodeant veris disciplinis ac sobriis disputationibus exercitati, qui graviter evangelicoque spiritu prædicent verbum Dei, .et efficaci quadam eloquentia commendent eruditorum animis.' Ibid. III 1253. The three colleges, it is hardly necessary to say, are Queens', Christ's, and St. John's. With respect to his deliberate estimate of three col |