Page:English Historical Review Volume 35.djvu/13

 1920 ERASMUS 5 difficult to give a completely fair account of one's own develop- ment and to assign a proper weight to the influences which have formed one's character ; it is not every one who can write an Apologia pro vita sua or describe himself in the past. More- over, Erasmus himself tells us that at Deventer he got the first taste of a better training/ and he arrived at Bois-le-Duc, a more backward school than Deventer, ' knowing more than his teachers '. A boy of thirteen does not usually know by heart, as he did, all the works of Terence and Horace.^ Adrian VI was a product of the same school of Deventer, and a system which gained the praise of Gerson at an earlier date, of Luther and Melanchthon at a later, cannot have been wholly bad in the days of Erasmus. For its very method aimed at forming scholars such as Erasmus was, and if an Erasmus was produced it was surely not by accident. Left without father and mother, urged to the step by guardians who cared more for his property than for himself, in 1486 he made his profession as a Regular in the Augustinian monastery of Stein ; and although the society was uncongenial and its manners rough, he carried on the study of good letters with his friend William Herman as a comrade. At the age of eighteen he condensed a work of Valla's on the teaching of Latin,^ and even thus early he had gained his great taste for St. Jerome. But his study of Valla was not solely philological. He says he was exploring in an old monastic library, when ' (for no coverts afford more delightful sport) some game of no common sort fell into my net '. It was Valla's notes on the New Testament, and these were a great delight to him.* But the Netherlands with their shifting politics were then, as now, merely a stepping-stone to other lands, and in 1491 Erasmus entered the service of the bishop of Cambrai,* a patron who is described as lacking in generosity and who after all did not open to his client the expected road to Italy. In 1492 Erasmus was ordained priest, and between this date and 1496 he went to the university of Paris, which had still much of its old reputa- tion, and where Greek was taught as it had been since 1458, even if now inefficiently under Hermonymus, ' twofold times a Greek, always hungry and asking heavy fees '.® His experiences there, described later in letters and in the Colloquies, at the college of Montaigu, and at a hostel for poor students, are well ' In his earlier letters there is no expression of discontent with his early schools. See Nichols, i. 88. This is curiously parallel to Luther and his early monastic life. (see Nichols, i. 36). Erasmus at Paris see Nichols, i, cc. iv, v, and vi.
 * So we are told by Beatus Rhenanus in a letter to Hermann, bishop of Cologne
 * For his study of Valla see Nichols, i. 69 ; for the epitome, pp. 86-7 ; Allen, L 587.
 * See Nichols, i. 381 ; Allen, L 407. » Allen, i, app. v, p. 587.
 * In Epistle to Antony, abbot of St. Bertin (Nichols, i. 314 ; Allen, i. .353). On