Chapter XXIV (33)

Such, perhaps, was the feeling of many a student who, coming fresh from the schools of Louvain, or the cloisters of Winchester or Oxford, found himself suddenly dropped down upon a world which seemed to have broken loose from all time-honoured traditions of scholastic life. Perhaps he had been used to set before him the musty maxim of Philip the Almoner,[331] that “that is no true science which is not the companion of justice;” or he had learned from Hugh of St. Victor to regard humility as the foundation of wisdom; or he was familiar with the saying of the Angel of the schools, that the best way to make progress in philosophy was to keep the commandments of God. But if he had the gift of prudence, he would think twice before citing such authorities in the polite circles of the Roman _literati_. He would have been hooted at as a barbarian. The monks and schoolmen were never spoken of by the professors of the new learning save in terms of execration and contempt. They were, to use the language of Erasmus, wretched creatures, whose language was as uncouth as their apprehension was dull. In those days there was no greater reproach than to call a man a _Scotist_--it meant precisely a _dunce_[332]--and those who held communion with the Muses and the Graces would have judged it an affront to be required to treat with respect the memory of St. Thomas or St. Bonaventure. And truly their venerable names, and the maxims they had laid down for the guidance of Christian scholars, would have been sadly out of place in the sumptuous orgies of the Chigi palace, or those luxurious soirées where prelates, ambassadors, and men of letters did not refuse to appear as the guests of the most questionable characters. The Roman academy which had been suppressed by Paul II., and had revived under Julius II., was now at the height of its renown. Its members generally met in some delicious suburban garden, and there, under the shade of the thick foliage, in an atmosphere heavy with the perfume of the orange-flower, they recited poems, proposed philosophic questions, and whiled away with song and merriment long hours of the day and night. Amid scenes of such Epicurean enjoyment the stranger might have been forgiven had he imagined himself taking part in the revelries of pagan rather than of Christian Rome. On the walls of the luxurious banqueting-rooms, in which he assisted at those suppers of world-wide celebrity, he might see representations from the comedies of Plautus, reminding him how close a parallel was to be drawn between the manners described by the Latin poet and those of the sixteenth century. From the elegant revellers around him he might hear the authority of Pliny quoted to prove that the human soul differed in nothing from that of beasts; or, exchanging the philosophic for a lighter mood, he might perhaps be called on to assist at some macaronic exhibition, such as the crowning of Querno, the drunken buffoon, arch-poet of Rome; or be required to listen to the facetious improvisation of Folengo or Mariano Fetti,--the former a monk, the latter a friar,--both of whom had quitted their cloisters to ply the trade of professional jesters. Thankful enough he would be to escape from these polished circles and return to his own barbarous land and the society of those rude English, who, as Politian contemptuously remarked, “knew nothing of letters, and busied themselves with their sheep,” and who perhaps might, in their turn, have thought with the Psalmist, that it was well with those who knew no literature, and were only mindful of justice.[333]

We are not left merely to conjecture the abuses which throve in such a soil. We have the grave avowal of the commission of Cardinals already referred to, that “in no city was there to be witnessed such corruption of manners as in this city, which should be an example to all.” Vice, in fact, had ceased to wear a veil; it stalked abroad under the noonday sun, and too often found illustrious support. Yet, strange to say, the existing abuses, monstrous as they were, were more superficial than they seemed. The evil scum that rises to the surface of society must not always be taken as a test of what lies beneath; the gaudy charlock may toss its wanton head and blazon itself to the eye, but the good seed is quietly germinating below, and in the day of harvest its sheaves will not be wanting. The Church is happily not governed by professors and scholastics, and at the very time when the literary world of Rome was exhibiting the spectacles described above, the Fifth Council of Lateran was holding its sessions in that very city, and promulgating its decrees for the reform of the Universities, the College of Cardinals, and the Roman Court.[334] The Church, by the mouth of her episcopate, was solemnly exposing and condemning those very evils which thoughtless observers were perhaps laying to her charge. In the decree of the Council on the study of the Scriptures and the liberal arts, the Fathers, after setting forth the vital importance of the education of youth, go on to declare that schoolmasters and professors are bound not merely to teach their scholars grammar and rhetoric, but yet more to instruct them in their religion, and to make them study sacred hymns and psalms, and the lives of the saints; and forbid anything to be taught on Sundays and festival days save what refers in some way to religion or holy living. Decrees of this sort, if they plainly indicate the deplorable practical paganism which at that time prevailed in most public academies, show us also that the rulers of the Church were sensible of the evil, and earnestly desirous to apply a suitable remedy. And, as we shall see hereafter, this very city of Rome that seemed so corrupt, cherished in her bosom a principle of life and power, which eventually cast out the infection which had hung over her so long, and so accomplished her own purification. Long before Luther had uttered the word “Reform,” it had rung through the halls of the Lateran. The Fathers of the Council spared nothing and dissimulated nothing; and at the opening of the ninth session, a remarkable oration was delivered by Antonio Pucci, clerk to the Apostolic Chamber, in which he called on the Pope to set about the work in earnest. “Holy Father!” he exclaimed, “you desire to restore peace to Christendom, and you do well in so desiring. But see first that you extinguish the intestine wars of our vices, and exterior peace will soon reappear. Behold the world! Behold the cloister! Behold the sanctuary! Everywhere there are abuses to reform, and it is with the house of God that we must begin.”

Yet it can be no great matter of surprise that passing strangers did not always penetrate the distinction between the _Church_ and the _City_ of Rome, and that the undeniable corruption of the Roman literary circles brought ecclesiastical rulers into disrepute, and sapped in many minds the sentiment of loyalty to the Apostolic See. That both Erasmus and Luther carried with them from Rome fatal impressions, which, each in his own way, turned to the detriment of religion, is not to be doubted. Erasmus, indeed, had no cause to be scandalised by a state of society which was exactly to his taste. He was _fêted_ and flattered by prelates and philosophers, and in his letters from Rome he wants words to express his raptures at those delicious hours which he spent among libraries and academies, in the reunions at the palace of the _divine_ Cardinal San Giorgio, or the yet more charming assemblies in the Pope’s private chambers. Yet, while enjoying the cup of pleasure to the full, his keen sarcastic eye was taking the measure of all he saw, and it was on his journey back to the north, that he beguiled his travelling fatigues with composing his “Praise of Folly,” in which Cardinals, Popes, and Prelates are made the subject of his most caustic gibes and pleasantries. And this, after all, is the way of the world; it is a lynx-eyed critic, and has ever a rigorous standard for those who ought to be saints, and a ready condemnation for those who fall short of it. Erasmus, who was himself worldly to the heart’s core, had yet sense enough to feel that worldliness, however delightful, was out of place on the threshold of the apostles, and he made other men feel it too, with all that biting irony of which he was the master.

Luther, a man of different mould, visited Rome in a widely different spirit. He was in the first fervour of what he considered his religious conversion, when in 1510 he came thither full of enthusiasm, and fell on his knees as he entered the city, to kiss the soil watered by the blood of martyrs; though he afterwards mocked at his own devotion and at the simplicity with which he ran about from church to church prepared to believe and venerate everything that he saw. He too carried away impressions that were never effaced. His coarse, strong Saxon nature had little taste for the arts and the _belles-lettres_, and was only repelled by the magnificence around him. The Olympic deities that met his eye at every street corner, the heathenish adornments of the very churches, where pictures and images of Christian mysteries were presented in the garb of paganism, and the yet worse heathenism which met his ears from the elegant literary crowds among whom he passed in his coarse friar’s frock, all this sank into his soul to be reproduced on the day when he launched his imprecations against the seven-hilled city, and held her up to the scorn of his countrymen, as “the dwelling-place of dragons, the nest of bats and vultures, the resort of hobgoblins, weasels, gnomes, and demons.”[335] Nor did it matter anything to his audience that the enormities he exposed were far surpassed by those which he committed, and that the apostle of reform had himself let loose on the world the reign of frenzied license; the scandals he propagated did the work which he intended, and indelibly fixed in the Saxon mind the tradition which identified Rome with Babylon.

We need not here concern ourselves with the history of that great revolution which history miscalls the Reformation. Before the death of Leo X., that which had been deemed in its beginning to be but “a squabble of friars,” was ending in the apostasy of nations. The Roman academicians, however, were less moved at the tidings which reached them in 1520, that the Pope’s Bull, the Decretals, and the Summa of St. Thomas, had all been burnt together by Luther in the public square of Wittemberg, and that the Pope himself had been declared by the same authority to be Antichrist, than at another piece of intelligence, which was communicated to them on February 9, 1522, and which startled them like a clap of thunder. Leo was dead, and the choice of the Cardinals had fallen on the Cardinal Adrian of Utrecht. The burning of St. Thomas in person would have been a light matter to them, in comparison with the election to the Papal dignity of a plain austere Louvain professor; already known to fame as the advocate of ecclesiastical discipline, the friend and colleague of Ximenes, and it was more than whispered, the supporter of scholasticism. He was a Fleming, a “Scotist,” a Goth, and the enemy of letters. He had come into the city without pomp of any kind, and had ordered one of the half-finished triumphal arches, that was to have cost a thousand ducats, to be destroyed. He had discharged ninety out of the one hundred equerries kept by his predecessor. He had brought his old Louvain housekeeper with him to the Vatican, and was dismissing the improvisatori and whole troops of other Court idlers. They had taken him over the Museum attached to his palace, and he had been heard to mutter the words _Idola antiquorum_, when standing before the group of the Laocoon. Some of Sadolet’s most elegant Latin epistles had been placed in his hands, and he had briefly commented on them as “the letters of a poet.” “I verily believe,” writes Jerome Negri, in terrible alarm, “that he will do as Pope Gregory did before him, make a clean sweep of our libraries, and perhaps grind up our statues to furnish mortar for building St. Peter’s.” The artists cried out that now they should all be starved; the professors bewailed the certain return of Gothic barbarism: Bembo set out at once for Venice, and Sadolet retired to his bishopric of Carpentras, where he displayed those noble qualities which had as yet found no room to expand in the artificial atmosphere of the Court.

Never was there a more undeserved reproach than that which stigmatised Pope Adrian as the enemy of learning. Erasmus, who had been defended by him from the attacks of some over-zealous scholastics, judged far otherwise, but the Romans could not forgive his indifference to ancient art, and his condemnation of those paganising scholars, whom he termed “Terentians.” Still less could they forgive his plain speaking on the subject of reform. “Many abominations,” he said, “have existed near this Holy Chair, abuses in spiritual matters, and evil everywhere. We pledge ourselves, on our part, to use our utmost endeavour to reform that Court which has, perhaps, been the source of the evils we deplore.”

In his brief pontificate of twenty-two months he was unable to accomplish the work which lay so close to his heart. His death was regarded by the Roman literati as a kind of providence, a special grace from heaven which had averted the return of mediæval barbarism; and some of them went so far as to adorn with garlands the house of his physician, to whose want of skill the fatal termination of Adrian’s illness was ascribed, hanging over his door the inscription--“To the Saviour of his country.”

Yet those two-and-twenty months, which seemed so fruitless, witnessed the turning of the tide. The election of another Medici as successor to Adrian was the signal for extraordinary rejoicings, and for the return to Rome of many who had abandoned it after the accession of Adrian. Clement VII. had all the personal grace and refined intellect of his family; he had less taste for pleasure, and more aptitude for business than Leo, and was a true lover of learned men. He induced Sadolet to resume his functions as secretary, and did his best to engage Erasmus to devote his genius to the earnest defence of the Church.

The spirits of the Romans revived when they witnessed the splendid patronage of letters exercised by the new Pope and his kinsman, Cardinal Hyppolitus de’ Medici, who entertained in his household no fewer than three hundred learned men. The artists and academicians confidently reckoned on a return of their golden age; and yet all were more or less conscious of a certain indefinable change which had stolen over the public mind, betokening that a reaction was setting in, and that a new era was at hand. The German revolt from the Church had by this time assumed proportions which it was impossible to ignore. The question of the English divorce was causing grave inquietudes, and whilst the shadow of new and unprecedented calamities hung heavy over the world, even the most indifferent minds felt perhaps that something more earnest was called for at that moment than the cultivation of the Muses. It cannot, indeed, be said that the tide of social corruption was checked; yet another and a better element was silently at work; and, hidden in the glittering crowd,

Some few there were who with pure hearts aspired
To lay their just hands on the golden key
That opes the palace of eternity.

Clement had summoned to his Court several illustrious ecclesiastics who, whilst inferior to none of their contemporaries in literary merit, were desirous above all things to provide a remedy for those grave domestic abuses which, they rightly felt, afflicted the Church more heavily than any attacks from her exterior foes. Among these were the Venetian, Gaspar Contarini, a profound scholar, and a man of fervent piety; Sadolet, who, now greatly weaned from the pursuits which had formerly absorbed him, desired to devote his remaining years to his pastoral duties; Matthew Ghiberti, the worthiest prelate of his time, whom Clement had admitted to his closest confidence, and raised to the dignity of Chancellor and the see of Verona; the Prothonotary, Cajetan of Thienna, and the Cardinal Caraffa, Archbishop of Theate, who afterwards became Pope under the title of Paul IV. The jubilee year 1525 also brought to Rome a number of devout and earnest pilgrims, among whom was our own great countryman Reginald Pole, then a student at Padua, whom Bembo called the most virtuous young man in Italy, and whose happiness it was to enter on his list of friends the name of almost every one of his contemporaries most illustrious for scholarship or piety. Men of this stamp felt the need, in the midst of that luxurious and enervating atmosphere, of some tie of Christian fellowship which might support and invigorate their spiritual life; and the result was the formation of a humble confraternity which met in the church of SS. Silvestro and Dorotea, and took the name of “the Oratory of Divine Love.”

Similar associations were springing up in other cities of Italy, but that at Rome is remarkable as being the germ whence afterwards developed the order of the Theatines. A plan was concerted among the members of the confraternity for instituting an order of regular clerks, in which the ancient canonical mode of life should be revived; this being suggested as offering the surest means for effecting that reformation of manners among the clergy which all good men so earnestly desired to forward. This design was carried out with the approbation of the Pope; Caraffa and St. Cajetan being chosen the two first superiors. Of the latter it was commonly said that he desired to reform the world without letting the world know he was in it, and in the northern cities of Italy, where he had hitherto chiefly resided, he had the character of uniting in one person the seraphic gifts of a contemplative to the heroic virtues of an apostle. The rule adopted by the regular clerks was nearly the same as that of the ancient Canons Regular. It appears certain that their original design included the formation of ecclesiastical seminaries, and in all essential particulars the new foundation bore a striking resemblance to that set on foot in the eighth century, with a very similar purpose, by St. Chrodegang of Metz. And thus we see how saintly men, when they took in hand the work of ecclesiastical reform, found no better means for carrying out their views, than turning back into the old paths, and following the traditions bequeathed them by a golden antiquity.

The order of Theatines, however, whilst yet in its infancy, was threatened with extinction when that terrible calamity fell upon Rome, to describe which one needs to use the language of the inspired writers, when they detail the woes that were to chastise the guilty city, which was yet the chosen city of God. The political combinations which had closely allied the Roman Pontiff with the Court of France, exposed him to the hostility of the Emperor Charles V., whose armies entered Italy in the early part of the year 1527, and threatened to lay siege to Rome. On the 5th of May, the city was stormed by the ferocious bands of the Constable de Bourbon, consisting chiefly of German Lutherans, animated to frenzy by the thirst for plunder and a wild religious fanaticism. The Pope took refuge in the castle of St. Angelo, and from thence had the anguish of witnessing his capital given up to scenes of sacrilege and violence which find no equal in history. The sack of Rome by the barbarian Goths lasted but six days, but the Germans held possession of their prey for _nine months_, every hour of which witnessed some fresh abomination. The citizens were subjected to horrible tortures, to compel them to give up their hidden treasures; the churches were desecrated, and sacred relics tossed about the streets; troop-horses were stabled in the Pontifical chapel, and littered with Bulls and decretals; mock celebrations of holy rites were performed by drunken troopers, who, decked out with cardinals’ dresses, pretended to hold a conclave, and proclaimed the election of Luther as Pope. Out of a population of 85,000, 50,000 citizens are calculated to have perished by torture and the sword, and the excesses of the soldiers at last brought a pestilence in their train, which all but annihilated, the conquerors themselves; so that the city, awhile before so brilliant and luxurious, became little better than a desolate and fetid tomb.

Amid the nameless horrors of that time it is needless to say that neither piety nor learning procured any mercy for their owners. St. Cajetan was scourged and tortured, and then compelled with his brethren to abandon the Roman territory and take refuge in Venice; where their modest house a few years later afforded hospitality to St. Ignatius and his first companions. As to the academicians, we are assured by Jerome Negri that the very few who escaped from the sword were dispersed into foreign lands, and that all subsequent efforts to restore their Society on its former footing proved an utter failure. In fact, when the city was at last delivered from the apostate hordes that possessed her, it was only to be exposed to the new scourges of famine, pestilence, and inundation, and during these calamities there reappeared in her streets, not the gay bands of artists and _literati_, but reformed Camaldolese and Capuchin friars, whose existence in the city, says one writer, was first made known to the Romans during the plague of 1528. Rome, indeed, recovered from her overwhelming disasters with astonishing rapidity, and it was not long before the Court of Clement VII. reassumed much of the brilliant character which it had borne under Leo X. But Roman society no longer groaned under the dictatorship of professors. The grave troubles of the Church drew to her capital men of earnest and exalted piety, who responded to the cry that came from every Catholic land for a General Council that should not only vindicate the doctrine of the Church against heretical innovators, but courageously enter on the reform of practical abuses. Delivered by her terrible chastisement from the meretricious splendour of a false prosperity, Rome prepared to put on her beautiful garments as of old, and to purify herself from the contagion which worldly men had brought into the very presence of the sanctuary. Even whilst her enemies were counting her among the dead, and rejoicing over her humiliation, she arose to a more beautiful and vigorous life than ever, so that many of those whose hearts had become estranged turned to her once more, and beholding her invested with the majesty of ancient discipline, recognised the seven-hilled city to be indeed “the city of truth, the mountain of the Lord of Hosts, the sanctified mountain.”[336]

_CHAPTER XXIII._

ENGLISH SCHOLARS OF THE RENAISSANCE.

A.D. 1473 TO 1550.

The revival of polite letters in this country may be considered as dating from the foundation of Magdalen College, in 1473. Not only was it the most perfectly constituted college in the realm, but its great founder had amply provided for the cultivation of humane literature; and at the period of his death, Grocyn, the future restorer of Greek studies at Oxford, was Divinity Professor, and Wolsey and Colet were among his pupils. Oxford at this time presented a spectacle which seems to have struck the imagination of all her foreign visitors. Three hundred halls and grammar-schools, besides her noble colleges and religious houses, furnished means of education to a far larger number of students than resort thither at the present time. The English universities, though admitting the new learning, still adhered to the scholastic philosophy--a fact which formed the groundwork of those charges brought against them by some of their contemporaries, and re-echoed by Wood, of being behind their time. It is not very easy to determine what was the precise state of the English schools at the opening of the sixteenth century. On the one hand, it is clear that the revival of classical literature found plenty of enthusiastic supporters among English scholars; and, if we are to draw any conclusions as to the nature of English education of this time from Sir John Elyot’s treatise of “The Governor,” we should be disposed to think that children of the upper classes were then expected to begin their classical studies while still in their cradles. A nobleman’s son, he says, should have none about him, not even his nurses, who cannot speak pure and eloquent Latin. At the very least, their English should be clean, polite, perfect, and articulately pronounced, omitting no letter or syllable. At seven, a boy is to begin his Greek and Latin grammars together; and at twelve he is supposed to have so completely made the Latin tongue his own that he need no more apply himself to its study, but confine his labours to Greek. The whole treatise, which is in many respects valuable and interesting, proves that the writer had imbibed that tiresome form of classical enthusiasm which wears you out with its illustrations from the ancients. Even the necessity of religion is supported by an appeal to the examples of Romulus and Numa Pompilius, though, accidentally, we are allowed to peep into the old Catholic nursery, and see the children “knelyng in thir games before ymages, and holdyng up thir litel white handes, movyng thir mouths as if they were praieing, or going and singyng, as it were in procession.” This treatise, published in 1531, plainly infers that at that time a noble youth was expected to begin his studies very early, and to aim at something more than the name of a scholar. On the other hand, there was a certain prejudice in favour of foreign academies, which induced those who in all ages make it their business to follow the fashion, to undervalue Eton and Oxford, and to consider you a Goth or a rustic if you had not graduated in some Italian university. The mediæval spirit which still hung about the cloisters of Oxford was quite out of harmony with the prevailing tastes; and undoubtedly those same cloisters sheltered many worthy Conservatives of the old school who clung to Aristotle and Oxford Latin, and thought very little of the new-fangled Platonists.

Hence, those who desired to imbue themselves with classic literature generally found their way to Italy, and the rage for a foreign education had become so excessive that Barclay introduces an allusion to it in his “Ship of Fooles:”--

One runneth to Almayne, another to France,
To Paris, Padwy, Lombardy, or Spayne,
Another to Bonony, Rome, or Orleans;
To Caen, Toulouse, Athens or Colayne;
And at the last returneth home agayne
More ignorant.

The reproach conveyed in the last line was probably deserved by some whose foreign scholarship was only sought for fashion’s sake; but it does not certainly apply to the knot of illustrious Englishmen whom we find studying in the Italian schools at the close of the fifteenth century. Among them was Richard Pace, who had been brought up in the household of Langton, Bishop of Winchester, and had been sent by his patron to study at Padua, where he had Latymer and Cuthbert Tonstall for his tutors; William Linacre, who had repaired to Florence and been received into the family of Lorenzo de’ Medici, who, charmed with his modesty and talents, chose him for the companion of his son’s studies: and the amiable and simple-hearted William Lily, whose Greek learning had been acquired at Rhodes, and who was then perfecting himself in Latin literature in the schools of Rome and Florence. Colet also made the tour of Italy, after taking his degree at Magdalen, and on coming back to England, he returned a second time to Oxford, where in 1497 he found Grocyn and Linacre delivering public lectures on Greek. Their audience was at first a small one, for the new learning was regarded with no little jealousy and suspicion in many quarters, and parties ran high between the Greeks and the Trojans, as the adherents of the opposite factions were commonly called. The Greeks expended their wit on the dulness of their adversaries, whom they represented as “sleepy, surly fellows, who talked bad Latin, and never said a smart or clever thing;” whilst the Trojans denounced their brilliant rivals as dangerous innovators. The truth lay pretty evenly between the two parties. The Oxford studies were possibly in some respects behind the time, and not merely profane, but sacred learning also appears, from Wood’s account, to have been at a low ebb; and for this, as has been elsewhere shown, the lawyers and the logicians, the Lollards and the Anti-Roman party, must share the blame among them. Still, when we remember the enthusiasm with which men like More and Erasmus regarded the English universities, it is difficult to believe that sound and solid learning can have been entirely wanting at Oxford,[337] and considering what sort of clouds hung on the horizon, the “Scotists,” perhaps, did not show themselves such dull fellows after all, when they warned their disciples to keep clear of foreign fashions, and set afloat the well-known proverb, “Let the Greeks beware of heresy.”

Colet did not hesitate to join the party of the Greeks, and to this he was moved not merely by a love of polite literature, but by the contempt and aversion which he had conceived for the scholastic philosophy. At Florence he had not only attended the Greek lectures of Politian and Demetrius Chalycondylus, but he had listened to the preaching of Savonarola, from whom he had caught an enthusiasm for Scriptural studies, and a burning zeal for the reform of abuses. So soon, therefore, as he had been ordained deacon he flung aside the Master of the Sentences, and began to read public lectures on the Epistles of St. Paul, though with characteristic temper he had disdained to receive any degrees in Divinity, accounting the studies which he should have had to engage in for that purpose as wholly empty and unprofitable. His earnest eloquence and original mode of treatment drew him more hearers than the classic erudition of Grocyn had been able to command, and there was not a doctor of law or divinity in the whole university, but gladly came to hear the young preacher, bringing their books with them.

It was at this moment that Erasmus paid his first visit to England, having been invited over by Lord Mountjoy, his former pupil at Paris. Erasmus at this time supported himself partly by his tutorships, and partly by the pensions which he received from the sovereigns who sought to attach him to their Courts, and from the learned friends whose pecuniary assistance he availed himself of with considerable freedom. At Oxford he was received into St. Mary’s Priory by the kind-hearted Prior Charnock, and in his letters expresses the singular delight which he felt at all he heard and all he saw. He soon made acquaintance with Colet, and was by him introduced to More, then studying at Magdalen, and to Wolsey, bursar of the same college; and in company with these new friends (he wrote to Mountjoy) he would be content to live all his days in the farthest extremity of Scythia. In short, he drew so brilliant a picture of the pleasant hours they spent in one another’s company, that Mountjoy, who was but just married, could not resist the temptation of running down to Oxford, and beginning a fresh course of study under his old master.

The friendship that sprang up from that time between Erasmus and Colet was strong and enduring. Yet no two men could be more unlike in their real character, however much their literary tastes may have coincided. Colet was heart and soul in earnest, and herein lay the strength and nobleness of a disposition which, as his friend owns, had in it many a dash of human infirmity. “When he speaks,” writes Erasmus, “you would think he was more than man: it is not with voice alone, but with eyes, and countenance, and with his whole demeanour.” He was of a hot and haughty spirit, and impatient of the least affront, qualities which imparted a certain harshness and vehemence to all his words and actions. Yet he had (and who has not?) his softer side, and the stern and fiery orator, as rigid and severe to himself as he was to others, was a lover of children, and delighted to make himself little with little ones, whom he compared to the angels, though, as we shall presently see, his love even of them was somewhat lacking in tenderness. Erasmus himself was not likely to be led into the excesses to which a nature like Colet’s easily betrays itself. There was no real earnestness about him. Had he not left his Epistles behind him, we might be amazed that one so deficient in every sterling quality of soul could have found a way to the hearts of all with whom he associated. But his letters explain the mystery. There was no resisting the charm of his wit, and his extraordinary gift of treating every subject on which he touched in the way that was most agreeable. After the lapse of three hundred years, the reader, who possesses nothing but the dead written letter of that graceful eloquence, feels its indescribable magic, the “certain Erasmianism,” as Colet calls it, and is carried away against his will by the bewitching pleasantry of a writer whose whole life he knows to have been contemptible. There was, moreover, one most attractive quality which he shared with More: nothing was able to ruffle his temper; and he had the happiest ways of restraining the sallies of his more fiery companions, and preventing their table talk after dinner from ever ending in a quarrel. Thus, on one occasion, when a disputation had arisen upon the sin of Cain, Erasmus, who judged by Colet’s sparkling eyes that the conversation had lasted long enough, and wished to end it, invented on the spot a story from some pretended ancient author, by which ingenious fraud the argument was broken off, and the company parted in the best of humours. He was moreover an advocate for moderation in all things, even in hostility to the scholastics, and once took up the defence of St. Thomas against the attacks of Colet, and represented that the Angelic doctor really did seem to have studied the Scriptures. But this time Colet bore him down, and could not contain his impatience at hearing a word said in favour of one whose dogmatic definitions of theology he hesitated not to accuse of arrogance. More held an equal place in the affections of both his friends; he had all the wit of Erasmus without his flippancy, and all the earnestness of Colet without his asperity of temper. He chose the latter as his director, and learnt from him a singular love for the inspired writings, and many precious secrets of self-mastery and mortification; but he had some spiritual instincts to which Colet was an utter stranger; and while the one was venting his annoyance at what he deemed the childish superstitions of the Canterbury pilgrims, as he watched them crowding to kiss the relics of St. Thomas à Becket, the other, with truer humility, thought it not beneath the character of a man of letters to feed his faith at the homely springs of popular devotion, and visited many an old English shrine on foot--a rare thing in those days, when even the common people went on horse-back.

We will pass over a few years, which brought their usual changes to the Oxford friends in all save the mutual regard which they bore for one another. The princely boy to whom Erasmus had first been introduced in his schoolroom, and who had won his heart by challenging him to reply to a Latin epistle, was now on the throne, “tall in body, and mighty in will,” says Stow, “and so prosperous in his kingdom, that it was called ‘The Golden Realm.’” Wolsey, whom we left a Demy of Magdalen, was now Cardinal, and had just succeeded Warham as chancellor, having the learned Richard Pace for his secretary. The European politics which he sought to guide had not made him neglect the cause of letters:--

“Witness for him
Those twins of learning which he raised in you,
Ipswich and Oxford!”

Good Bishop Fisher was hard at work introducing Greek studies at Cambridge, where Croke was delivering lectures, and where the new learning was better received than it had been at Oxford. The noble Countess of Richmond[338] had founded her two Cambridge colleges, her grammar-school at Wimbourne, and her “Lady Margaret” professorships; Fox, now Bishop of Winchester, was drawing up the statutes of Corpus Christi, that classical beehive, as he was pleased to term it, in which he provided for the study of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, under the professors or “herbalists,” who were for ever to drive all barbarism out of the bee-garden, and provide that the best classical authors should be read by his students. Linacre was now the royal physician and a man of importance; he had translated Galen, founded two lectureships at Oxford, and the College of Physicians, but at this moment he was contemplating whether it might not be well to give up professional fame and Court favour, in order to die a priest; and this design he afterwards executed. Grocyn, too, had ably maintained his scholar’s reputation, and was universally respected as long as he lived, says Erasmus, for his chaste and holy life. In the judgment of that critic, however, his firm adherence to Catholic dogma was somewhat excessive, and bordered on superstition, and he considers it necessary to apologise for this weakness on the part of his friend, who, he says, had from childhood been trained in the scholastic theology, and was exceedingly learned in questions of ecclesiastical discipline. More, whose early inclination for the cloister had yielded to the persuasions of his director Colet, had married and embraced a professional career; he had written his Utopia, and was struggling hard to preserve his independence, and keep out of the royal service, into which others so eagerly sought admittance. He desired nothing better than to be suffered to enjoy in freedom his happy Chelsea home, where it was his delight to direct the education of his children, to gather around him his learned friends, and relieve the intervals of business with polite and Christian studies. In that family circle Erasmus always found a place during his visits to England, and it is to him that we owe the charming portraiture of a household, the venerable memory of which has sunk into the English heart and become almost the typical example of an English home. As to Erasmus himself, his course during the same period is easily told: he had published his Greek Testament and his learned editions of the Fathers, and had thereby earned a European reputation; he had flitted about from England to Paris, from Paris to Germany, from Germany back again to England, and thence to Rome. Courted, flattered, and admired by all, he was the great _bel-esprit_ of the day, and the lighter productions of his pen were telling upon public opinion, much perhaps in the same sort of way that clever journalism affects it in our own day. He was directing his keen powers of ridicule against some real abuses, but at the same time his mocking wit was recklessly striking at sacred things and bringing them into popular contempt. In his “Praise of Folly,” and his “Adages,” he had hit hard at popes, cardinals, pilgrimages, devotions to the saints, and indulgences, but above all at monks and friars, whom he invariably holds up to execration, as something too pitiably vile and puerile to be endured by men of sense. In short, to use the oft-quoted saying, he had laid the egg which Luther was to hatch, and though he afterwards resented this charge, and was wont to say that he had laid a hen’s egg, and Luther had hatched it a crow’s, yet, as Hallam has shrewdly remarked, whatever were the bird, it pecked hard against the Church and her religious orders. His mode of warfare was to paint every one who opened his lips in defence of the old order of things as a half-witted ignoramus, and to bespatter his adversaries with epithets and witticisms, in an easy flowing style which everybody read and everybody laughed at; and when the laugh was once raised the victory was more than half won.

It remains to speak of Colet, now Dean of St. Paul’s, who had steadily followed out the purpose to which he had devoted himself at Oxford, had given himself up heart and soul to the task of reviving the study of Scriptural Divinity, and was opposing himself like a rock to every form of practical corruption. At this distance of time it is not easy for us to satisfy ourselves as to the real character of one who has left nothing but his fame behind him, and whose views and teaching are to be gathered, not from his own writings but from the epistolary correspondence of Erasmus, whose narrative is naturally coloured by the bias of his own mind.[339] In those days of Court sycophancy, we cannot but admire the courageous independence of such a man, and the single-hearted fervour with which he set himself to reform his chapter, to expound the gospel to the people, and to urge upon his fellow clergy a strict observance of the canons. In his sermon preached before Convocation, in 1511, he chose for his text the words of St. Paul: “Be ye not conformed to this world;” and thundered out in plain, strong, and noble words his denunciation of those abuses which he called the “matter of the Church’s reformation;” such as “the worldly lives of the prelates,” “their hunting and hawking,” and “their covetousness after high promotions.” The reformation he said must begin with my “reverend Fathers the Lord Bishops,” whom he prayed to excuse his boldness, for he spoke out of very zeal for Holy Church. In this famous sermon there is doubtless something too much of asperity, yet it does not seem to have been taken amiss. The single-hearted honesty of the speaker was understood and appreciated by his hearers; and it must be added that his own example added force to his words. Colet was a man of pure and blameless life, simple and austere in manners, and ready to spend himself for what he deemed the cause of Christ. His exhortations had extraordinary success; other ecclesiastics were animated to greater zeal in the discharge of their pastoral duties, and began to preach to their people on sermons and festival days. Divinity lectures, too, were delivered in the church of St. Paul, both by the Dean, and certain learned men whom he invited to assist him, and these lectures were no longer permitted to take the form of dry disputations, but were chiefly commentaries on the Scriptures, particularly on the Epistles of St. Paul, with which Colet was so enamoured, says Erasmus, that he seemed to be wholly wrapped up in them. With all his classical tastes he thought less of manner than of matter, in his public orations. Scriptural simplicity was what he aimed at; he wanted, to use his own rather uncourteous phrase, to “clear away the cobwebs of the schoolmen from the plain text of the Bible.” He did not altogether neglect the study of style, and sometimes condescended to read Chaucer and other English poets for the purpose of improving his diction. But in general his thoughts came out too hot and molten for him to deliberate much in what words to utter them, and the careful polish which Erasmus bestowed on his writings was viewed by him as more worthy of a pedagogue than of a preacher, who has his heart full of big thoughts and is in haste to utter them.

How little there was of a courtier about him may be gathered from the sermon which he preached before the king at the time when he was preparing for his French war, in which, instead of offering that monarch the welcome incense of flattery, he very plainly expounded to his hearers the sin which Christian princes committed by wars of ambition, in which they fought, not under the banner of Christ, but under that of the devil.[340] Much of this was surely excellent; and had this been all, we should be ready to yield our hearty sympathy to Colet in spite of those “specks of human infirmity” which his best friends saw and regretted. A reformer has rough work to do, and in doing it has need of a certain fund of audacity which easily overpasses the just bounds of discretion, and can scarcely avoid wounding the susceptibilities of those whom he undertakes to amend. Yet such things are easily pardoned in them whom we know to be only “zealous for the Lord of Hosts,” and who cannot “restrain their lips” when they declare His justice in the midst of the people. But there were other elements in the character of Colet from which we instinctively shrink, for the simple reason that they betray a mind out of harmony with the teachings of faith. We have already seen him bringing the charge of arrogance--himself surely with greater arrogance--against the Angelic doctor, unable to repress his intolerance of what he deemed his too strict definitions of doctrine; and betraying an angry contempt for the popular devotions sanctioned by the Church, but which _he_ impeached of superstition. That practical abuses may easily have crept into many of these devotions is what no Catholic will think himself called on to deny, and that where they existed they deserved to be exposed and denounced is equally obvious; yet when we find that the only _fact_ alluded to by Colet’s biographer as having stirred the wrath of the reformer was the eagerness displayed by the Canterbury pilgrims to kiss the shoe of St. Thomas, preserved there as a relic, we are disposed to think that it was not merely these supposed abuses, but the devotions themselves which he regarded with dislike. And this judgment is confirmed when we find him betraying a similar want of sympathy with the spirit and practice of the Church in cases where there could be no question of superstition. He set very little store by the practice of daily hearing or saying Mass: he considered the recitation of the Divine Office in private by priests to be both a burdensome and a superfluous duty, and seems to have been, to say the least, indifferent to the value of prayer for the dead. All this we learn from the correspondence of Erasmus, who further informs us that there were a vast number of opinions received in the schools from which Colet strongly dissented, and that he not only read the works of heretical writers without scruple, but was accustomed to say that he often learned more out of them than he did from orthodox writers, who were content to be always running over a beaten track.[341] It can therefore be no great matter of surprise that Colet, before long, became involved in trouble. While some men regarded him as little short of a saint, others, alarmed at his bold views and the uncompromising language in which he expressed them, looked on him as an incipient heretic, and as such denounced him to his bishop. Articles were drawn up against him and laid before the Primate, but Warham dismissed the case as frivolous, and Colet was never afterwards interfered with on account of his liberty of speech.[342]

Erasmus, and after him Fox, tells us that the three articles of accusation referred to his manner of treating the worship of images, his preaching against the worldly lives of the clergy, and his complaints of those who read their sermons in a cold and formal manner; vague charges, which would be very justly designated as “frivolous.” Tyndale, however, in his usual burlesque style, declares in his “Reply to More,” that “the bishop would have made Colet a heretic for translating the Pater Noster into English,” and this random shot has been gravely taken up and handed on from one author to another as a sober bit of history. “He _even_ gave the people parts of the Bible in English,” says a Scotch reviewer, “such as the Lord’s Prayer!” Whilst Knight seriously assures his readers that not only were the English Scriptures at this time utterly unknown, but that “_there was scarce so much as a Latin Testament in any cathedral church in England_.”

Colet’s friendship with More and Erasmus meanwhile remained unbroken, and in the intervals of graver duties the three friends were wont to meet at the house of Dame Christian Colet, the Dean’s mother, in the (then) pleasant country suburb of Stepney, of which parish Colet was vicar. Erasmus has sketched the good old lady in her 90th year, with her countenance “still so fair and cheerful, you would think she had never shed a tear;” and Colet lets us know the pleasure which she found in receiving her son’s guests, and in their agreeable and witty conversation. Stepney, with its green lanes, fresh country air, and rural population, would often picture itself to the eye of More when he grew weary of his life in town; and in his early married days, when his narrow means obliged him to content himself with a house in Bucklersbury, the hardworked lawyer was glad enough, like other cockneys, to run down to Stepney on Saturday afternoons, and refresh himself with the merry talk of his friends, as they sauntered in the trimly-kept gardens and admired the noble strawberries brought over from Holland, or the damask roses lately introduced into England by Linacre.

Not unfrequently the party included some of the learned foreigners who just then crowded the Tudor Court, such as Andreas Ammonius,[343] the king’s Latin secretary, whom Erasmus praises as being “so noble and generous, so free from envy, and so full of great endowments,” or their old Oxford crony, John Sixtine, a Frisian by birth, but now naturalised in England, and esteemed by all good scholars for his versatile genius. It seems strange to us in these days to associate the names of foreign canonists and divines with our country parish churches, of which, however, they not unfrequently enjoyed the revenues. Hidden in a sequestered valley of Devonshire, surrounded by woods that are dear to village children for the sweet-scented violets that grow there in such wild profusion, shut in by hills which they will not easily forget who have seen their sloping fields all bright with golden sheaves, made brighter with the intense sunshine that seems borrowed from a southern sky; the tourist may perhaps have stumbled on the little church of St. Blaze of Haccombe, with its quaint encaustic tiles and cross-legged effigies of the crusading lords of Haccombe, all as perfect as in the days of John Sixtine, the friend of More and Erasmus, who was arch-priest of the college formerly attached to this church by Sir Stephen de Haccombe, to the end that perpetual prayer might be made there for the souls of his ancestors. Dr. Sixtine had other more splendid and lucrative benefices, but the beauty of that little rural valley seems to have clung to his heart, and among the various bequests which he names in his will, appears the sum of fifteen pounds in honour of God and St. Blaze, towards the reparation of the church of Haccombe. Let the good deed be noted here, as well as the kind and homely feeling which induced him to direct that twenty pounds should be distributed among his parishioners at Eglescliffe, “to buy them instruments necessary for their country labours.”