Mr. Seebohm, in his amiable study of the Oxford Reformers,[39] is inclined to find the motive of Erasmus' first visit to England in his desire to pursue his studies, and especially that of Greek, under circumstances more favourable than he could find elsewhere; but connecting this visit with his earlier experiences and especially recalling the struggle for maintenance in which he was just then engaged, we can hardly fail to find at least suggestions of other motives. That his visit did, in fact, powerfully influence his study and his thought there can be little doubt.

The immediate occasion of the journey, which we may safely place in the summer or autumn of 1498, was an invitation of young Lord Mountjoy. Of all the English youths whom Erasmus had known intimately at Paris, Mountjoy was the favourite. He seems to have been sincerely attached to his teacher and to have done his part in making easier for him the rugged path of pure scholarship. Writing from England to Robert Fisher, another of these young men, who was then in Italy, Erasmus says[40]:

The English trip must be regarded in a way as a substitute for the Italian. He was "girded" for Italy in every way but one. He could not find the money, and he took this chance of living on that English generosity of which he had made so successful trial at Paris. Nor was he in any way disappointed. During the year and a half, perhaps, of his first visit he was entertained by one and another of the patrons of English learning, or by some of the English scholars themselves—for scholarship in England was taking on that character which it has ever since maintained, of being joined with wealth and station. This was a type of scholarship so far unfamiliar to Erasmus and it made its due impression upon him. He liked everything in England. He writes to Fisher:

There is a touch of sincerity about these expressions, in spite of their conventional form, which is borne out by the whole future relation of Erasmus to the English group of scholars. For the first time in his life he forgets to grumble and has no occasion to beg.

In England, too, Erasmus found himself, for the first time, in relations with men who he had to confess were his superiors in many ways. We know nothing of the circumstances of Erasmus' arrival, but it seems that Mountjoy soon sent him on to Oxford and that he was received there in a college of Augustinian Canons known as the College of St. Mary. So far as any place could be called his English headquarters, this was it. The prior of the college, Richard Charnock, was far from being the kind of person Erasmus became so fond of representing as the natural head of a monastic establishment. He was a cultivated gentleman and sound scholar after Erasmus' own heart and in the friendliest relations with the most "advanced" of the early English humanistic scholars. On just what terms Erasmus lived at St. Mary's is not quite clear. He refers often to the Prior's "hospitality," but we find him asking Mountjoy to send him "his money" (pecunias meas) at once that he might repay Charnock his many obligations. Erasmus was very careful in his use of all the parts of speech except adjectives, and this phrase seems to indicate on the one hand that he was a boarder at the college, and on the other that he had some regular understanding with Mountjoy as to a supply of money.

Through prior Charnock, probably, Erasmus was introduced to the leading scholars of the University. Among these by far the most interesting to him was John Colet, a young man of just his own age, who was living at Oxford as a private or independent teacher. He was a man of admirable character, of rare acuteness of mind, already well out of the fogs of mediÆval scholasticism which were still clinging around Erasmus. Colet seems at once to have impressed himself upon the visitor as a new type. He was, first of all, a man of fine culture, the son of a Lord Mayor of London, reared in ease and plenty and given from the outset that wider outlook into the world of thought which Erasmus was just beginning to get for himself. He had enjoyed the great advantage of the Italian journey with all that it implied by the way. He was a theologian, but as far as possible removed from the quality which had made the very name of theology hateful in Erasmus' ears. At Paris, as he continually complains, theology still meant the futile struggle of hair-splitting schools of a pseudo-philosophy to explain the how and the why of Christian truth. For the truth itself they seemed to have little comprehension and little care. New light was coming into theology, as into all science, through the larger and freer dealing with ancient learning; but how to connect this learning of antiquity with the present problems of religion and of life—that was the all-important question to every serious mind.

That the very clever mind of Erasmus was already fixed on serious things there can be no doubt. He was thirty years old; he had largely overcome the mechanical difficulties of the scholar's work. He had read the vast mass of the Latin classic authors with great diligence and with profound personal interest. He had had his fling as well as his trials at Paris. If he had aimed to be merely a classicist he was well fitted to join the great army of those flippant scoffers who had already brought discredit upon learning by failing to give it a serious and a modern content. Learning, divorced from life, was already beginning to lose its hold upon many circles of European interest. Every such failure was only another argument given to the surviving mediÆval methods why men should not desert them until something better had been found.

And if Erasmus was fitted by his training to imitate the gay and brilliant shallowness of the Italian Humanists, he was perhaps still more drawn their way by the natural cast of his mind. He liked bright things and bright people. He was fond of ease and comfort. His interests were largely bounded by his own personality. He loved praise and could not endure reproach. He demanded friendship, but would not be bound by any ties that threatened his own convenience. His vanity called for continual food, and he often provided it by protestations of modesty which called forth devoted expressions from his admirers. The impression of his quality at this time is not a lovely one, and yet he was plainly more attractive in person than he is to us in his correspondence. He made friends and, on the whole, considering his motto, "to love as if thou wert some day to hate and hate as if thou wert some day to love," he kept them remarkably well.

The English visit was a critical time to Erasmus. His mood in the months just before had been one of discouragement, just the mood which might well have turned a man of his tastes and apparent character into a life of brilliant literary flippancy. A glimpse into his own reflections on this point is given in the letter[41] to Mountjoy above quoted, written from Oxford:

Erasmus in England found his better self awakening to renewed courage and exertion. Even before he came over, he had begun to see that perhaps a solution of his life-problem might be found in a deliberate rejection of the mediÆval method in theology by throwing it all away and going straight back, first to the original documents of Christianity themselves, and then to the early commentators on Christianity who had expounded these documents under the direct influence of the classic culture. Jerome, especially, seemed to him worthy of the most careful study and of a new and scientific edition. This was the "great work" to which he refers in his correspondence with Battus as being interrupted by Battus's trivial demands for some show-pieces to please their patroness.

Underneath all his thought there lay continually this purpose to apply his learning to making clearer the ways of God to man. The Oxford friends were eminently men to strengthen his intention, and we may feel sure that here was the real source of Erasmus' higher content in England. Let us try to make acquaintance with them through Erasmus' own words; and first with Colet, beginning at the point of their first meeting. In a long letter bearing date 1519, just twenty years later, and written under the first shock of Colet's death, Erasmus gives a short but feeling sketch of his friend's life. This sketch[42] forms the basis of all subsequent treatment of Colet.

The occasion of eating was improved by learned and serious conversation.

Then follows an account of the endowment by Colet of the famous St. Paul's school, to which he gave the best energies of his later years.

The careful analysis of Colet's character which concludes this sketch is quite different from Erasmus' usual undiscriminating praise of what suited himself. He presents Colet to us as an eminently human personage, inclined by nature to all the joys of earthly life, and yet subduing all lower temptations by the force of his unconquerable will. He was a man of strongly marked individual opinions, yet so careful of the feelings of others that he avoided discussion excepting among friends or when it was forced upon him. At such times, however, he spoke as one compelled by an inner impulse of which he was no longer master. In the first interview of which we have any record, at a dinner at St. Mary's, in Oxford, a discussion arose on the very speculative question of the meaning of the story of Cain's sacrifice. Erasmus and an unknown theologian took sides against Colet[43]:

So in this later, more careful account Erasmus refers to Colet's view of Thomas Aquinas. He himself, it appears, had come to have some respect for Aquinas and had made various attempts to draw out Colet on the subject. He had so far failed, but one day, returning again to the charge, he found Colet's eyes fixed upon him,

The result was that Erasmus looked more carefully into his Aquinas and greatly revised his judgment of him.

Remembering that this sketch of Colet was written two or three years after Luther had nailed his Theses on the church door at Wittenberg, we may gain from it a good insight into the views not only of Colet, but of Erasmus as well, upon many of the doubtful questions of the early Reformation days. Nowhere, perhaps, in Erasmus' writings do we find more temperate and cautious suggestions. Already we may discern in clear outline the determining motives of his position in the great struggle. In his pet abhorrence, the monastic system, Colet went with him to the point of free criticism of faithless and irreligious monks, but, like Erasmus himself when he was, so to speak, in the witness-box, he had nothing to say against the monastic life in itself. He had little to do with monks and gave them nothing at his death, but he professed great affection for the life of seclusion and often declared that he would enter it himself

In this affectionate, but at the same time discriminating, review of Colet's life and character we may easily see outlined certain ideals of Erasmus himself. He admires in his friend a quality of discretion, which, under some circumstances, might come pretty near to duplicity. On many matters he had two opinions, one for himself and his intimate friends, and another for the public. That is a condition of mind that will do very well so long as the great issues of a dispute are not brought out into sharp relief. In the times that try men's souls, when events will no longer bear nice distinctions, but demand that men shall stand up and be counted—yes or no—on the question of the hour, then this quality of discretion may be the ruin of a man. It was toward precisely such a crisis that the affairs of the Christian Church were rapidly tending when Erasmus learned to know John Colet in the delightful intercourse of the college at Oxford. Colet had the good fortune to die (in 1519) before the supreme test came to him. Erasmus was to spend the best energy of his declining years in the struggle to live up to the difficult standard of having one opinion for himself and another for the world.

In the several subjects touched upon in the review of Colet's opinions we hear plainly the echoes of discussions, growing ever more intense, upon the secondary issues of the Reformation. Colet approved of monks, of secret confession, of an elaborate ceremonial, of a priesthood resting upon divine consecration, and he would not for the world question the validity of recognised church law. Yet he was ready to deal fearless blows at faithless monks, at a superstitious repetition of confession, an overdoing of the ceremonies of worship, and the worldliness of the parish clergy. He approved of all learning, but he condemned the application of learning to a fruitless definition-making.

The first letter we have from Colet to Erasmus is an address of welcome to England, a graceful little note, as full of flattery as any of Erasmus' own and of interest to us chiefly as showing that the visitor had not come to England unknown. He had, it is true, written nothing of consequence, but Colet had seen some little things of his at Paris, and Erasmus' acquaintance there with young Englishmen of high social rank could hardly fail to have carried at least his name across the Channel. The same impression of a reputation already grounded is embodied in the well-known story of Erasmus' first meeting with another Englishman, with whom his relations, at least by correspondence, were to be still more intimate,—Thomas More. The incident is told in the life of More by his great-grandson as follows[44]:

This story plainly implies a considerable degree of reputation for both persons concerned, but as More was at most twenty years old and known only as a very bright young student at the time of Erasmus' arrival, we are compelled either to give up the story or to place it some years later and suppose that Erasmus did not meet More at all during his first visit. This latter supposition, however, is quite impossible, since Erasmus speaks plainly of More at this time as among his most valued friends. The author indeed prefaces the anecdote with the statement that the two scholars had long known and loved each other and that their affection "increased so much that he [Erasmus] took a journey of purpose into England to see and enjoy his personal acquaintance and more entire familiarity,"—most of which lacks support in known facts.[45] We can only accept so much of it as implies previous acquaintance by correspondence, and that may well have taken place while Erasmus was at Oxford and More in London working with as much zeal as he could command at his preparation for the bar. If we strip off the decorations and suppose the meeting to have occurred during some visit of Erasmus in London from Oxford, this very pretty story is not altogether improbable. At all events it strikes the key-note of a friendship which was to last as long as life. The disparity in age (eleven years) was more than made up by the great activity and originality of More's mind and the singular charm of his engaging personality. During this first visit to England we have no specific record of Erasmus' relations with More, except this one anecdote of the dinner and another of a visit paid by the two friends to the children of King Henry VII. at the royal villa of Eltham, near Greenwich. Erasmus' account of this visit, given many years afterward,[46] is an explanation of how he came to write an ode to the young prince. He was dragged into it, he says, by Thomas More, who came to him while he was staying at Lord Mountjoy's in Greenwich and invited him to take a walk for pleasure into the neighbouring village.

This rather silly tale is of interest only as giving the first hint of any connection of Erasmus with the English royal family, a connection not wholly without influence on his future. If More was playing a joke on his friend, as has been generally assumed, it was certainly a very poor one. Other indications of Erasmus' occupations in England are found in a famous letter to his former teacher in Paris, Faustus Andrelinus. It is a merry letter to a merry fellow and must not be taken too seriously.[47]

Two other Englishmen, both his seniors by some years, became friends of Erasmus during this first visit,—William Grocyn and Thomas Linacre. Grocyn was primarily a scholar and teacher, versed especially in Greek. Linacre was a physician of the highest repute in his day, and identified with the whole future of medical science in England through his foundation of the London College of Physicians. Both had studied in Italy and there had put themselves under the influence of the leading personages in the later humanistic generation. Both had become skilled in Greek learning, and were doing their parts, each in his own way, to further the advancement of Greek study in England. Grocyn was probably teaching Greek at Oxford when Erasmus came thither, and so far as he ever acknowledged obligations to any teacher, the younger man admits the great profit he derived from this riper talent. In regard to Linacre he notes especially a severe and painful accuracy which was, probably, the reason why he left so little behind to attest his scholarship. He could not satisfy his own exacting standards. With both these men Erasmus seems to have lived on terms of affectionate intimacy. There are indications that they were at times rather tired of his persistent begging, but this did not interfere with their friendly interest, which ended only with their lives.

Delighted as he plainly was with everything and everybody in England, better treated than he had ever been in his life, why did not Erasmus take his own advice and settle down there in some regular occupation? So cosmopolitan a genius as his could hardly have dreaded a change of residence; the scholar's home was wherever the sun shone, and certainly never was man more free to follow the bent of his own wishes than was Erasmus. That the idea was not a strange one to him is clear from many indications. Especially was it forced upon him by a suggestion from Colet that he might stay on at Oxford and join him in what seemed then likely to be his life-work of expounding the fundamental documents of Christianity upon the "new" basis of science and common sense. What Colet's arguments were on this point we can only guess from a reply of Erasmus, but they seem to have been such as would come naturally from one scholar to another in whom he thought he recognised a spirit kindred to his own. Colet lived in that new world of thought which was the old, and saw before him the mission of clearing away the mediÆval rubbish that had piled up in the long interval between the really old theology of the Greek Fathers and the new thought of his own times. And here he seemed to have found the man of all others best fitted to help him—young, learned in the language and filled with the spirit of the ancients, free from all ties of family or home and, apparently, deeply serious in his interest in religious things. Colet had had a test of his quality in several active discussions on points of theology, which had brought out at once his learning and his desire for truth even at the sacrifice of his own less well-considered opinions. Erasmus had shown a docility in revising his judgments in very marked contrast to his firmness when dealing with other opponents. The difference was, that in facing Colet he found an opponent who was using his own weapons with equal skill and even greater courage. In the letter of Erasmus declining to remain at Oxford we hear nothing of the question of ways and means. It is impossible that it should not have been in his mind, but there is every reason to suppose that it did not influence his decision. The only trustworthy patron he had yet found was an Englishman; there was a chance of a university appointment, and, failing this, the prospect of private pupils was better in England than anywhere else. We are told ad nauseam of a considerable money loss which he suffered on leaving England. So that we are sure almost beyond a doubt that his reasons for declining what must have been a very tempting proposition were somehow connected with his larger scholarly ambitions.[48]Of course he makes as much as possible of his own modesty: Colet "is (to quote Plautus) asking water of a rock." How should he have the face to teach what he has never learned; how warm the frost of others when he himself was all of a shiver with fear? He praises Colet for his courage and zeal in the cause of the "ancient" theology as against the "new-fangled race of theologians, who spend their lives in mere arguments and sophistical quibbling." Not that he altogether condemns these studies, for he approves of every kind of study,

He goes on to protest his unfitness for the task and especially to defend himself against the charge that he had given Colet reason to believe he might accept his suggestion.

We seem to find here a suggestion that Colet had laid before him two propositions,—one that he might become a teacher of the classic literature in which he was already a master; the other that he should join with himself in setting the meaning of Scripture free from the absurd trammels which the scholastic methods of interpretation had laid upon it. Either of these tasks, with a reasonable prospect of support and the delightful intercourse of academic life, would, one must suppose, have been a supreme attraction for Erasmus. The only possible explanation of his refusal is his dread of putting his neck into any yoke whatever, no matter how easy it might be. A possible suggestion of this motive is found in the somewhat enigmatic sentence that "poetry and rhetoric had ceased to interest him since they had ceased to be necessary." This may have meant that literature in itself was important to him only as a means of livelihood, and since he was, at least temporarily, provided for, he did not care to teach it at Oxford. Literature was henceforth to be a means to the higher end of redeeming theology, the regina disciplinarum, the "queen of sciences," from her present degradation. But for this latter work he was not as yet prepared. If we ask why he did not choose to continue his preparation under the very favourable conditions at Oxford, we may perhaps find a partial answer in his deep-seated dislike of the work of teaching. He could talk beautifully about it, but it seems pretty clear that he always hated it. So Oxford lost a professor, but the world gained a man.