BOOK II. THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY. Videmus Latinam eruditionem, quamvis impendiosam, citra Graecismum mancam esse ac dimidiatam. Apud nos enim rivuli vix quidam sunt et lacunculae lutulentae; apud illos fontes purissimi et flumina aurum volventia. ERASMUS, Ep. 149 ed. Allen, 1906; (Paris, 1501). Ea pro Capessite ergo sana studia...; veteres Latinos colite, Graeca amplexamini, sine quibus Latina tractari nequeunt. omnium litterarum usu ingenium alent mitius, atque elegantius undequaque reddent. MELANCHTHON, De Corrigendis Adulescentiae Linguae Graecae osoribus ita responsum volo, omnem elegantem doctrinam, omnem cognitionem dignam hominis ingenui studio, uno verbo, quicquid usquam est politiorum disciplinarum, nullis aliis, quam Graecorum libris ac literis, contineri. MURETUS, Or. II iv (Rome, 1573). CHAPTER X. ERASMUS. IN tracing the history of humanism, our natural course at the present point would be to turn from Italy to the other countries of Europe and to embark on a survey of the Revival of Learning in each. But there is one eminent scholar whose life and influence, so far from being confined to his native land, are even more closely connected with France, England, Italy, Germany and Switzerland than with the land of his birth. Our survey of the early history of scholarship beyond the bounds of Italy will therefore be preceded by some account of Erasmus, so far as his remarkable career was connected with Classical Scholarship. Erasmus Erasmus was born at Rotterdam in 1466. He was the second of the two sons of Gerard of Gouda, near Rotterdam, and Margaret of Zevenberge in Brabant. His father was in priest's orders at the time of his birth, and the name Erasmus was that of a martyred bishop of Campania, who was revered in the Low Countries, as well as in England'. The Latin equivalent, Desiderius, was adopted by Erasmus himself, whose full name in the old Latin style was Desiderius Erasmus Rotterodamus. In his ninth year he was sent to school at Deventer, where the mediaeval text-books of Grammar were still in use, and his high promise was there recognised in 1484', when the school was visited by Rudolphus Agricola, afterwards described by Erasmus himself as 'the first who brought from Italy some breath of a better culture'. In the same year he was removed to a school at Bois-le-Duc, distinctly inferior to that at Deventer, though 1 F. M. Nichols, Epistles of Erasmus, i 37 f. 2 P. S. Allen, Epp. Erasmi (1906), i p. 581. p. 1 of Ep. ad Botzhemum, 30 Jan. 1524 (Leyden ed. of Opera, i init.). 128 HOLLAND, FRANCE, ENGLAND, ITALY. [CENT. XV f founded by the Brothers of the Common Life'; in 1487 he entered ' an Augustinian monastery near Gouda; and in 1492 was ordained priest. The ten years spent in that monastery happily left him much leisure for study, and among the works that he there wrote was an abridgement of the Elegantiae of Laurentius Valla. He next entered the service of the bishop of Cambrai, who sent him to Paris, where he wrote a laudatory preface to a Latin history of France and thus became known to Colet. In Paris he learnt a little Greek, but made his living mainly as a teacher of Latin, counting among his pupils one of his future patrons, the youthful Lord Mountjoy, whom he accompanied to England in 1499. He was welcomed by Colet at Oxford, and by More and Warham in London. Early in the following year he returned to Paris, there to resume the work which he describes in the pathetic words :'my Greek studies are almost too much for my courage, while I have not the means of procuring books, or the help of a master'. He is conscious that 'without Greek the amplest erudition in Latin is imperfect", and, of his early study of Homer, he says (like Petrarch) 'I am refreshed and fed by the sight of his words, even when I cannot always understand him. In 1500 he produced his Adagia, and, in the following year, an edition of Cicero De Officiis, besides working at Euripides and Isocrates. For part of 1502-3 he resided at Louvain, where he studied Lucian in the newly published Aldine text of 1503. His return to Paris was followed by a visit to London, where (early in 1506) he presented Warham with a translation of the Hecuba, and Fox with a rendering from Lucian, whom he continued to translate in conjunction with More. In June he left for Italy, visiting Turin, where he received the degree of Doctor in Divinity; Florence, which appears to have attracted him but little; Bologna, where (as we have already seen) 1 The school to which Erasmus was removed in his 14th year is described by himself as one of those belonging to the Fratres Collationarii (Ep. 442), i.e. the Brethren of the Common Life. Cp. Delprat's History of the Confraternity (Utrecht, 1830), 196, 313 f, quoted (with other passages) in a letter to Dr A. W. Ward from F. van der Haeghen of Ghent. 2 iii 80; Nichols, Epp. i 233; Ep. 123, p. 285 Allen. * iii 968 D; 36 and 96 B; De Ratione Studii, § 3; Ep. 129, p. 301 Allen. iii 78; Nichols, i 270; Ep. 131, p. 305 Allen. Woodward's Erasmus, ii 135. he worked quietly at Greek; Venice, where (as a guest of Aldus) he prepared a second edition of his Adagia; Padua, where he attended the lectures of Musurus, and then passed through Florence and Siena to Rome, where he was far less interested in its old associations, its 'ruins and remains', its monuments of disaster and decay', than in the libraries and in the social life of the papal city'. Returning to England in 1509, he published his famous satire, the Moriae Encomium. Soon afterwards he found a home in Cambridge, where, under the influence of John Fisher, bishop of Rochester, he became Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity. His rooms were near the south-east corner of the inner cloistered court of Queens'. It was there that in October, 1511, he taught Greek to a little band of Cambridge students, using for his text-book the Grammar of Chrysoloras, and hoping to begin that of Theodorus Gaza, if he could obtain a larger audience'. Meanwhile, he was aiding Colet in his great design for the future school of St Paul's by writing his treatise De Ratione Studii (1511), as well as a work on Latin composition, De Copia Rerum et Verborum (1512), and a text-book of Latin Syntax, founded on Donatus (1513). He was also producing Latin renderings from the Moralia of Plutarch, and was beginning to prepare his edition of St Jerome, and his text of the Greek Testament. Early in 1514 he left Cambridge with a view to the publication of these works at Basel in 1516. His edition of the Greek Testament, the first that was actually published, was accompanied with a Latin version and with notes suggested by those of Valla, which Erasmus had discovered in 1505*. 1516 was also the date of the first edition of his famous Colloquies. The years between 1515 and 1521 were spent mainly at Basel and Louvain, where he aided in organising the Collegium Trilingue for the study of Hebrew, Greek and Latin. In the spring of 1522 he returned to Basel, making it his home for the next seven years. He there published his Ciceronianus (1528), a celebrated dialogue on Latin 1 De Nolhac, Erasme en Italie, 1888 (cp. p. 91 supra). 2 Aug. 1511-Jan. 1514. He had paid a brief visit in 1506 (Allen, i P. 590 f). 3 Ep. 123 (iii 110); cp. Ep. 233, p. 473 Allen. Cp. Ep. 182, p. 406 f Allen. S. II. 9 |