Page:English Historical Review Volume 35.djvu/16

 8 ERASMUS Januaiy this was afterwards enlarged into the Adages. On a later return journey his portmanteau containing liis manuscript of St. Jerome was bundled into another boat and caused him many misgivings. As we read and feel with him we seem to be in almost modern times. It was on this first visit that he made friends with Colet and More ; thus forming the brotherhood which Seebohm described so well. But there is one criticism of Seebohm's book which must be made. He depicts Colet as the moving spirit of the little band, so far as they had a common aim at all. Yet long before Erasmus saw Colet he had marked out, indeed his teachers had marked out for him, the path of biblical study and of a living theology. Even his dislike of the scholastic method, the scientific jargon, the technical terminology of the middle ages, had existed before, and it should be remembered that the Common Lot stood far removed from scholastic lines. Writing to his friend and pupil, Thomas Grey, before this visit to England, he said * : ' I, the famous theologian, have become a Scotist. . . you have not the least notion of a theological slumber. . . .' And he says of Epimenides, ' he also published theological books, and in them tied such syllogistic knots that he could never imtie himself '. Epimenides slept, it is true, but ' most of the theolo- gians of to-day never waken at all '. Epimenides has come to life again in Scotus. Erasmus himself is striving to become a theologian of their type : ' I am doing my utmost not to say anything in pure Latin, to give up all grace and wit, and I think I am succeeding. There is hope they will at last own Erasmus.' But he kept his wit, while some of them had never much to lose. All this language of his is, he explains, only a jest at the expense of the scholastic theologians of the day, with their brains rotten, their speech barbarous, their minds dull, their learning thorny, their manners rude, their life savouring of hjrpocrisy, and their hearts as black as night. Erasmus and Colet were brothers indeed : like true friends they thought the same and wished the same, but Erasmus in his ideal of theology owed little or no original inspiration to the great Englishman. The tribute Erasmus laid upon the grave of his lamented friend was great indeed, but it is matched by another which he paid to the memory of another, of Vitrarius,^ the Franciscan of St. Omer, from whom he had derived an impulse towards a study of St. Paul and also of the Fathers, and whose resemblance to Colet was strong: he was a monk out of harmony with the level tones around him, the very ideal of the truest monk. Among the names of his earliest friends and constant corre- ' Nichols, i. 141 f., Allen, i. 190. This letter is a good description of Erasmus's views, and the early date, August 1597, may be noted.
 * See Dnunmond, i. 123 f. ; Allen, i. 372 (note to £p. 163, 1. 3), and Ep. 169.