Page:English Historical Review Volume 35.djvu/14

 6 ERASMUS January known.* The hard life left its mark in illness, and the profitable care of private pupils, among whom Thomas Grey ^ and William Hunt, Lord Mountjoy, were the richest, was, after all, a distraction from the main end of his life. Some offers he refused ; no bribe shall lead him away from sacred studies : ' he had not gone to the university to teach or to make money, but to learn,' ^ and to learn, with the far-off hope of a journey to Italy before him,* he was resolved. It should be noted, I think, that Erasmus was essentially cosmopolitan because he was essentially medieval : the traditiouB of the Empire lingered longest about the scholastic world, and Erasmus, with no fatherland to speak of or rather with a father- land that had once been Grerman,^ and had scarcely yet grown to be Dutch, fell easily into the scholar's place in such a world and such a brotherhood of learning. If he missed the inspiration of patriotism, he was equally removed from the isolation that sometimes goes with it, and so Erasmus, who thought in the same Latin which he spoke,^ is the finished tjrpe of a medieval scholar, a type which gradually died out after the Reformation and the separation of the nations, although here and there it left a stray representative, and a stray representative only, in such scholars as Casaubon. To this stage of his career belong especially the most painful letters of his life, those which deal with his patrons and his relations to them : the stingy Englishman from whom much was expected and little gained, the Lady of Veere, the owner of Toumehem, and the abbot of St. Bertin. He would prefer, he tells Batt, * a certain amount of cash sent with " his letter" to a most ample sum on paper '.' There were few, he says, who would give enough to maintain a man able to write books worthy of immortality. ' Tell my Lady ', he writes to Batt, ' that I cannot for shame expose my state to her,' and then he describes ' See the Colloquies under 'Ix^voipayia : George. ' Out of what hencoop or cave do you come ? ' Lewis. * Why do you ask me such a question ? ' Oeorge. * Because you have been so poorly fed : you are so thin, a person may see through you and yon crackle with dryness. Whence come you ? ' Leivia. ' I come from the C!oUege of Montaigu.' Dorset family. See Nichols, i. 115 ; Allen, i. 174 (£p. 58). ledge, Richter, Erasmu-a-Stitdien, app. B, p. xix f. it out in Latin and then translated it into English (see his Avtobiography). England and its old schools had a little kept up the traditions of the seventeenth century, which in its turn had not broken touch with the middle ages. The disuse of the study of later Latin was the cause of much division in thought and taste. ' Nichols, i. 180.
 * Not, as often said to have been, a member (at any rate a legitimate one) of the
 * See Epistle to Nicholas Werner (Allen, i. 159 ; Nichols, i. 118).
 * See Epistle to Arnold Bostius (Allen, i. 202 ; Nichols. L 160).
 * For Erasmus's scanty German see Ep. 635, Le Clerc ; for his linguistic know-
 * So did Isaac Williams at a later day. In writing an English essay he thought