Page:English Historical Review Volume 35.djvu/19

 1920 ERASMUS 11 a boy had challenged Erasmus to prove his powers, was now the king, and under his smile learning seemed likely to flourish. From Louvain almost alone came a murmur against the Praise of Folly ^ the success of which indeed surprised its author most of all ; the very highest dignitaries of the church were pleased with it, and we need not suppose its appearance would have been a bar to its author's promotion ; some of the monks, the ' obscure men ' who were later on to attack Reuchlin, might dis- like what they understood of it, and to them its elegant Latinity was of itself suspicious. To this time belongs, not, it is true, the first, but a stronger impulse towards theology and, along with it, towards teaching. Nothing is worth doing, he says, except theology, and, in his letters of this period, teaching appears as a most honourable work. The paganism of Italy had disgusted him although its classic glamour had so strongly drawn him. If the Novum Instrumentum, the great biblical work of Erasmus, did not appear until much later, the copy of a manuscript made by Peter Meghen^ (the one-eyed carrier, the Cyclops of the letters) is dated 1506-9, so that the work itself was thought of and in process at an early date. His collation of the New Testament was now finished and his St. Jerome well on the way. This fresh impulse towards biblical work was due not only to his friendship with Colet and to that deepening of early tendencies which so often happens in middle age, but also to his Italian journey and his association with the press at Venice. He had seen how much was possible, and the scholar of the study was on the way to becoming the author of the busy world, independent of the patrons who helped him so grudgingly.^ His sojourn at Cambridge is perhaps known to some through his complaints about the small beer and the bad wine. His own excuse was that his old enemy the stone (fatal to so many medieval scholars) necessitated wine of a special kind. It was Greek, and his friend Andreas Ammonius was to procure it, and payment was promised even beforehand. It may be noticed that the same scandal flourished even more in the hot-house air of Italy, where Erasmus was depicted working double tides at the Aldine Press and drinking more than double. But it is only a scandalous story, and to clear the memory of Erasmus it is • There was a little mystification about the Praise of Folly, as there was in a greater degree about the Jvlius Exdusus. The work was taken to Paris and printed (Erasmus says) from a faulty manuscript. But he seems to have taken it there himself (Nichols, ii. 16). See Nichols, ii. 1 f. and 5. « See Allen, ii. 181-4, and also 164-6. letters printed in Nichols's vol. iii, but the need for them is less irksome and more incidental than at first.
 * His search for patrons still continued, as can be seen, for instances, in some