Page:English Historical Review Volume 35.djvu/23

 1920 ERASMUS 15 This revolution of thought on a large scale was completed every- where before the Reformation was two centuries old ; medieval learning, medieval ways of thought were slowly lost, and the middle ages themselves seemed useless and far away. Medieval Latin was cast aside like an ancient and discarded dress : it has been left for our own generation to disinter medieval thought, and through endeavours at understanding the middle ages, to restore the continuity which the Reformation, even more by its change of education than by its new theology, had unhappily destroyed. The Trilingual College at Louvain, and such new founda- tions sharing the spirit of the past, had, therefore, an influence and a significance entirely their own. Unhappily, both those who might have supported them from the inside but did not, and those who attacked them from outside, hindered their full fruition. So the foundation over which Erasmus watched with such loving care did not achieve all that it might. It remained a model for other universities to copy, but at Louvain itself there were theologians who looked on it with suspicion, and the course of politics, civil and ecclesiastical, denied it the international importance it should have gained. At Louvain,^ then, Erasmus found himself in the future stronghold of the Counter-Reformation ; incidentally, too, he came into closer touch with Ulric von Hutten who represented those sides of the German Renaissance and Reformation with which he himself was least in sympathy,^ and whom he had already met at Mainz in 1514^ and some three years later at Frankfort. With the death of Colet in 1519, and with the growing ferment in Germany, he seems to be losing friends of his own standing, some by death and others more sadly by division ; he is drawn into new connexions, and from 1518 onwards his relations to leaders like Luther and Hutten are increasingly important. Little need be said about the attitude of Erasmus towards admitted abuses : his Colloquies and the Praise of Folly are evidence enough in themselves. The important point is that amid the rising uproar everything he denoted by his expression ' good letters ' seemed to be at stake. In his letters he writes more than once that he was never ' a teacher of error or a leader of riot.' * On the positive side it became evident that while ready freely to criticize even a pope (if he did write Julius ' ' I heard a camel preach at Louvain, that we should have nothing to do with anything that is new ' : Canonization of John Reuchlin in Colloquies. Life of Ulric von Hutten, pp. 58, 172, 211, 324 f., and 355 (Eng. translation by Mrs. G. Sturge, 1874). ' Allen, ii. 4, n. 12 ; also Ep. 365 (ii. 155 f.) ; Nichols, ii. 154.
 * For a discussion of later relations between Erasmus and Hutten see Strauss,
 * See Drummond, ii. 44, and a letter to Wolsey, Allen, iii. 587 ; Nichols, iii. 378.