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THE

LONDON QUARTERLY REVIEW.

No. CCXI.

FOR JULY, 1859.

ART. 1.-Leben des Erasmus von Rotterdam. Von Adolf Müller. Hamburg, 1828.

2. Nouvelle Biographie Universelle. Tome xvi. Art. Erasme. Paris, 1856.

ALMOST all remarkable events, wonderful discoveries, mighty revolutions, have had their heralds, their harbingers, their prophets. The catastrophe, seemingly the most sudden, has been long in silent preparation. The earthquake has been nursing its fires, its low and sullen murmurs have been heard by the sagacious and observant ear, the throes of its awful coming have made themselves felt; significant and menacing movements are remembered as having preceded its outburst. The marked, if we may so say, the epochal man is rarely without his intellectual ancestors: Shakespeare did not create the English Drama; how long and noble a line, Galileo, Copernicus, Kepler, foreshowed Newton ! The Reformation, above all, had been long pre-shadowed in its inevitable advent. It was anticipated by the prophetic fears and the prophetic hopes of men; the fears of those who would have arrested or mitigated its shock, the hopes of those who would have precipitated a premature and, it might be, unsuccessful collision with the established order of things. More than one book has been written, and written with ability and much useful research, on the 'Reformers before the Reformation;' but we will pass over the more remote, more obscure, or at least less successful precursors of the great German, the English, and the French antagonists of the medieval superstitions and the Papal

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Despotism. We will leave at present unnamed those who would have evoked a pure, lofty, spiritual personal religion from the gloom and oppression of what we persist in calling the Dark Ages. There are two names, however, of surpassing dignity and interest, the more immediate and acknowledged harbingers of that awful crisis which broke up the august but effete Absolutism dominant over Western Christendom, and at once severed, and for ever, Northern and Southern, Latin and Teutonic Christianity. These two were Savonarola and Erasmus.

We have but recently directed the attention of our readers to the life and influence of Savonarola. Since that time, we have been informed, some important documents have been brought to light, and a life is announced by an Italian, who has devoted many years to researches among archives either neglected or unexhausted; and hopes are entertained, among some of his more intelligent countrymen, that, in this work, even more full and ample justice will be done to the great Florentine Preacher. Still, however interesting it may be to behold Savonarola in a more clear and distinct light, our verdict on his character and his influence as a Reformer is not likely to be materially changed. With all his holiness, with all his zeal, with all his eloquence, with all his power over the devout affections of men, with all his aspirations after freedom, with all his genial fondness for art, with all his love of man, and still higher love of God, Savonarola was a Monk. His ideal of Christianity was not that of the Gospel; he would have made Florence, Italy, the world one vast

cloister. The monastic virtues would still have been the highest Christian graces; a more holy, more self-sacrificing, but hardly more gentle, more humble, less domineering sacerdotalism would have ruled the mind of man. Even if Savonarola had escaped the martyr stake, to which he was devoted by Alexander VI. (Savonarola and Alexander VI.!!), it would have been left for Luther and the English Reformers to reinstate the primitive Christian family as the pure type, the unapproachable model of Christianity, the scene and prolific seedplot of the true Christian virtues.

Erasmus was fatally betrayed in his early youth into the trammels of monkhood, on which he revenged himself by his keen and exquisite satire. A deep and for a long time indelible hatred of the whole system, of which he was never the votary, and refused to be the slave, though in a certain sense the victim, had sunk into his soul; and monkhood at that time, with some splendid exceptions, as of his friend Vitrarius, of whom he has drawn so noble a character, was at its lowest ebb as to immorality, obstinate ignorance, dull scholasticism, grovelling superstition. The Monks and the Begging Friars were alike degenerate; the Jesuits as yet were not. But both Monks and Friars were sagacious enough to see the dangerous enemy which they had raised; their implacable hostility to Erasmus during life, and to the fame of his writings after death, is the best testimony to the effect of those writings, and of their common inextinguishable hostility.

Erasmus has not been fortunate in his biographers; much has been written about him; nothing, we think, quite worthy of his fame. His is a character to which it is difficult to be calmly just, and the difficulty, we think, has not been entirely overcome. He is of all men a man of his time; but that time is sharply divided into two distinct periods, on either side of which line Erasmus is the same but seemingly altogether different; a memorable instance how the same man may exercise commanding power, and yet be the slave of his age. The earlier lives, to one of which Erasmus furnished materials, are of course brief. and strictly personal. Le Clerc is learned, ingenious, candid, but neither agreeable nor always careful: Bayle, as usual, amusing, desultory, malicious, unsatisfactory. Knight is most useful as to the visits and connexions of Erasmus in England, to which he almost entirely confines himself. It is impossible not to respect, almost as impossible to read, the laborious Burigny; of which the late Charles Butler's minia

ture work is a neat and terse, but meagre and unsatisfactory, abstract. If we could have designated the modern scholar, whose congenial mind would best have appreciated, and entered most fully into the whole life of Erasmus, it would have been Jortin. Jortin had wit, and a kindred quiet sarcasm. From no book (except perhaps the Lettres Provinciales') has Gibbon drawn so much of his subtle scorn, his covert sneer, as from Jortin's Remarks on Ecclesiastical History.' In Jortin lived. the inextinguishable hatred of Romanism which most of the descendants of the Exiles, after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, cherished in their inmost hearts, and carried with them to every part of Europe; that hatred which in Bayle, Le Clerc, and many others, had an influence not yet adequately traced on the literature, and through the literature, on the politics and religion of Christendom. It was this feeling which gave its bitterness to so much of Jortin's views of every event and dispute in Church history. In these he read the nascent and initiatory bigotry which in later days shed the blood of his ancestors. He detected in the fourth or fifth century the spirit which animated the Dragonnades. Jortin was an excellent and an elegant scholar; his Latinity, hardly surpassed by any modern writer, must have caused him to revel in the pages of Erasmus; he was a liberal Divine, of calm but sincere piety, to whose sympathies the passionless moderation of Erasmus must have been congenial; nor was there one of his day who would feel more sincere gratitude to Erasmus for his invaluable services to classical learning and to biblical criticism. We cannot altogether assent to the brief review of Jortin's book growled out by the stern old Dictator of the last century, Sir, it is a dull book.' It is not a dull book; it contains much lively and pleasant remark, much amusing anecdote, many observations of excellent sense, conveyed in a style singularly terse, clever, and sometimes of the finest cutting sar

casm.

But never was a book so il composed; it consists of many rambling parts, without arrangement, without order, without proportion; it is no more than an abstract and summary of the letters of Erasmus, interspersed with explanatory or critical comments, and copious patches from other books. It is in fact Remarks on the Life of Erasmus ;' no more a biography than the 'Remarks on Ecclesiastical History' are a history of the Church. Of the later writers there is a laborious but heavy work by Hess, in two volumes, Zürich,

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1790; a shorter by Adolf Müller, Ham- | to catch by their wiles, the parents often burg, 1828, with a long, wearisome, and being ignorant, not rarely decidedly advery German preface on the development verse. This wickedness, which is more of mankind, and of the individual man. The life, however, has considerable merit; but Müller labours so hard not to be partial to Erasmus, as to fall into the opposite extreme. Perhaps the best appreciation, on the whole, of the great Scholar is in an article in Ersch and Gruber's Cyclopædia. M. Nisard has a lively and clever sketch, which originally appeared in the Revue des Deux Mondes,' and was reprinted in his Etudes sur la Renaissance,' but, as is M. Nisard's wont, too showy, and wanting in grave and earnest appreciation of a character like Erasmus.

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wicked than any kidnapping (plagio), these actors dare to perpetrate in the name of piety.' This was intelligible when they sought to enlist sons of family or wealth, who might fill their coffers or extend their influence; or men of very high promise, who might advance or extend their cause. But Gerard, the father of Erasmus, was one of ten sons, born of decent but not opulent parents, at Gouda (Tergau) in Holland. One, at least, of that large family (the desire to disembarrass themselves of the charge and responsibility of troublesome younger brothers Erasmus was born in the city of Rotter- was ever unhappily conspiring with the dam, October 28, 1467. Even before his proselytizing zeal) must be persuaded or birth he was the victim of that irreligious compelled to enter into holy orders or the and merciless system which showed too cloister. Gerard might seem by temperaplainly the decay and degeneracy of the ment and disposition the least suited to a monastic spirit. It blighted him with the life of mortification and sanctity. He was shame of bastardy, with which he was gay and mirthful; even in later life he taunted by ungenerous adversaries His bore a Dutch name, best rendered the fafather before him was trepanned against cetious.' But there was a graver disqualihis inclinations, against his natural disposi- fication, of which neither his parents nor tion and temperament, into that holy func- the monks were ignorant; he had formed tion, of which it is difficult enough to main- a passionate attachment to the daughter of tain the sanctity with the most intense de- a physician. The opposition of his parents votion of mind and heart. If we did not to the marriage, fatal to their design of daily witness the extraordinary influence driving him into the cloister, did not break of a strong corporate spirit, we might ima- off, but rendered the intimacy too close; gine that it was the delight of the monks of he fled from his home. Margarita, who those days, and their revenge upon man- should have been his wife, retired to Rotkind, to make others as miserable as they terdam, where she gave birth to a son desfound themselves. In the words applied tined to a world-wide fame. Gerard, after by Erasmus himself, they might seem to many wanderings, had found his way to compass heaven and earth to make prose- Rome. There he earned his livelihood by lytes, such proselytes usually fulfilling the transcribing works, chiefly those of classi words of the Scripture. That strange pas cal authors, the office of transcriber not sion for what might be called, in a coarse being yet superseded by the young art of phrase, crimping for ecclesiastical recruits, printing. He is said to have acquired a -a phrase, unless kidnapping be better, strong taste for those writers, and a fair often used by Erasmus-without regard knowledge of their works. A rumour was to their fitness for the service, lasted to industriously spread, and skilfully conveylate times, and became extinct, if it be ex-ed to his ears, that his beloved Margarita tinct (which we sadly doubt), with monk hood itself. Our readers may recollect how the Jesuits laid their snares for promising youths, and nearly caught Marmontel and Diderot; though perhaps it was easier to make clever Jesuits of clever boys, than devout or even decent monks of those who had no calling for cloistral austerities or ascetic retreat. In the days of Erasmus the system was carried on without any scruple. What boy was there of hopeful genius, of honourable birth, or of wealth, whom they did not tempt with their stratagems, for whom they did not spread their nets, whom they did not try

was dead. In his first fit of desperation
he severed himself from the world, and
took the irrevocable vows. On his return
to his native Gouda he found the mother
of his son in perfect health. But he took
the noblest revenge on the fraud which
had beguiled him into Holy Orders: he
was faithful to his vows.
sented by the Pope with a prebend, a de-
cent maintenance, in his native country.
No suspicion seems from this time to have
attached to his conduct, though he still
preserved his animal spirits and wit, and

He was pre

* Epist. ad Grunnium.

the lighter appellation of his youth still clung to him. The mother, too, from that time lived with unsullied fame. It was said of her

'Huic uni potuit succumbere culpæ.'*

Gerard, the son of Gerard (the name was fancifully, it does not appear by whose fancy, Latinized into Desiderius, and Desiderius again repeated in the Greek Erasmus), was sent to the school at Gouda, kept by a certain Peter Winkel. Winkel held him for a dunce; but the dulness may have been in the teacher, not in the pupil. He is said to have profited as little by the scanty in struction which he received as a chorister at Utrecht. At nine years old he was sent to the school at Deventer, accompanied by his mother, seemingly an accomplished woman, who, in addition to his ordinary studies, obtained him lessons in design and drawing. Deventer was a school kept by a religious brotherhood, not bound by Vows. The brothers of the common life' were the latest, and not the least devout and holy effort of monachism to renew its youth. The Order was founded by Gerard Groot, no unworthy descendent of the monks of Cluguy, of St. Bernard or St. Francis; they were rivals of the mystic school of Tauler, Rysbroeck, and de Suso, in the south of Germany. Their monas tery of Zwoll, near Brunswick, had nursed in its peaceful shades Thomas of Kempen (near Cologne), in our judgment the undoubted author of the last, most perfect, most popular manual of monastic Christianity, the De Imitatione Christi.' And now, as ever, in less than a century, among the brothers of Deventer, few hearts beat

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in response to the passionate, quivering ejaculations of that holy book,-they had become low, ignorant, intriguing, worldly fri

ars.

The light of the new learning was, however, struggling at Deventer against the old scholastic system. At the head of the

mus

school was Alevander Hegius, a pupil of the celebrated Greek scholar Rudolph Agricola, the first who brought the Italian learning over the Alps. Of Hegius Erasever spoke with profound respect. But Sinheim the sub-rector, was his chief instructor; be was too young, perhaps too poor, to come under the former. Sinheim was the first to discern the promise of Erasmus. On one occasion he addressed him: Go on as thou hast begun; thou wilt before long rise to the highest pinnacle of letters.' Agricola himself, on a visit to Hegius, was so much struck by an exercise of the boy that, having put a few questions to him, and looked at the shape of his head and at his eyes,' he dismissed him with the words, You will be a great man.' Erasmus himself says that at Deventer he went through the whole course of scholastic training, logic, physics, metaphysics, and morals,-with what profit may be a question; but he had learned also Horace and Terence by heart. What a step for

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one to whom Latin was to be almost his ver

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nacular language! Yet even at Deventer he was exposed to those trials, with which inveterate monkish proselytism had determined to beset him. There was no youth of candid disposition and of good fortune whom they (the monks and friars) did not study to break and subdue to their service. They spared neither flatteries, insults, petty terrors, entreaties, horrible tales, to allure them into their own, or to drive them into some other, fold. I myself was educated at Deventer. When I was not fifteen, the President of that Institution used every endeavour to induce me to enter into it. I was of a very pious disposition; but though so young, I was wise enough to plead my age and the anger of my parents if I should do anything without their knowledge. But this good man, when he saw that his eloquence did not prevail, tried an exorcism.

What do you mean?" He brought forth a crucifix, and, while I burst into tears, he said, with a look of one inspired, “Do you *Was there another son three years older than acknowledge that He suffered for you?" Erasmus? The earlier lives, those of which Eras-"I do fervently." "By Him, then, I be

mus himself furnished the materials, are silent

about him: but if the narrative, in the celebrated Epistle to Grunnius, be the early life of Erasmus hunself-and this cannot be reasonably doubtedthere was; and a passage in another letter, indicated by Jortin, seems conclusive. If so, the elder was a dull, coarse boy, who, having determined with Erasmus to resist, deserted his more resolute brother, and became a monk-a stupid and profligate one, whom Erasmus might be glad to forget, and for whose death he felt no very profound sorrow But this makes the case of the deception practised on the father even worse. Dupin, a Sound authority, and M. Nisard, admit the existence of the elder brother as certain.

seech you that you suffer Him not to have died in vain for you; obey my counsels, seek the good of your soul, lest in the world you perish everlastingly."

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But the boy was obliged to leave Deventer. The plague bereft him of his mother; the widowed father pined away with sorrow, and died at forty years of age. Erasmus was cast upon the world an orphan, worse than friendless, with faithless friends.

* De Pronunciatione. Opera, vol. i. p. 121–2.

His father appointed three guardians not of his own family; he may have still cherished a sad remembrance of their unkindly conduct. Of these, one was Peter Winkel, master of the boy's first school. There was property-whence it came appears not, but sufficient for his decent maintenance, and for an University education; sufficient, unhappily, to tempt these unscrupulous guardians. It was squandered away, or applied to their own uses: all the money was soon gone, but there remained certain bonds or securities. And now, like the father, the youth must be driven by fair or foul means into the cloister. The ambition of the promising scholar, in whom the love of letters had been rapidly growing, and had been fostered by the praise of distinguished men into a passion, was to receive an education at one of the famous Universities of Europe, But the free and invigorating studies of the University were costly, and might estrange the aspiring youth from the life of the cloister. He was sent to an institution at Herzogenbusch (Bois le Duc) kept by another brotherhood, whose avowed object it was to train and discipline youth for the monastic state. The two years of his sojourn there were a dreary blank: years lost to his darling studies. These men were ignorant, narrow-minded, hard, even cruel they could teach the young scholar nothing-they would not let him teach himself. The slightest breach of discipline was threatened with, often followed by, severe chastisement. He was once flogged for an offence of which he was not guilty; it threw him into a fever of four days. The effect of this system was permanently to injure his bodily health, to render him sullen, timid, suspicious. It implanted in his heart a horror of corporal punishment. Rousseau himself did not condemn it more cordially, more deliberately. It was one of his few points of difference in after-life with his friend Colet, who still adhered to the monkish usage of severe flagellation. One foolish, but well-meaning zealot, Rumbold, tried gentler means-entreaties, flatteries, presents, caresses. He told him awful stories of the wickedness of the world, of the lamentable fate of youths who had withstood the admonitions of pious monks, and left the safe seelusion of the cloister. One had sate down on what seemed to be the root of a tree, but turned out to be a huge serpent, which swallowed him up. Another had been devoured, so soon as he left the monastery walls, by a raging lion. He was plied with incessant tales of goblins and devils. He was at

length released, having shown steadfast resistance, from this wretched petty tyranny, and returned to Gouda. At Gouda he was exposed to other persecutions, to the tricks and stratagems of the indefatigable Winkel, who seems (one of his colleagues having been carried off by the plague) to have become sole guardian; his zeal no doubt for the soul of his pupil being deepened by the fear of being called to account for the property entrusted to his care. То admonitions, threats, reproaches, persuasions, even to the offer of an advantageous opening in the monastery of Sion, near Delft, the youth offered a calm but determinate resistance. He was still young, he said with great good sense-he knew not himself, nor the cloister, nor the world. He wished to pursue his studies; in riper years he might determine, but on conviction and experience, upon his course of life. A false friend achieved that which the interested importunity of his guardians, the arts, the terrors, the persuasions of monks and friars had urged in vain. Later in life Erasmus described the struggles, the conflict, the discipline, and its melancholy close, under imaginary names, it may be, perhaps, under circumstances slightly different. He mingled up with his own trials those of his brother, whose firmness, however, soon broke down; he not only deserted but entered into the confederacy against Erasmus, then but sixteen, who had to strive against a brother of nineteen. He threw over the whole something of the license of romance, and carried it on to an appeal to the Pope; from whom he would even in later life obtain permission not to wear the dress of the order. No doubt in the main the story is told with truth and fidelity in this singularly-interesting letter to Lambertus Grunnius, one of the scribes in the Papal Court. He had formed a familiar attachment to a youth at Deventer. Cornelius Verden was a few years older than himself, astute, selfish, but high-spirited and ambitious. He had found his way to Italy; on his return he had entered into the cloister of Emaus or Stein, not from any profound piety, but for ease and selfindulgence, as the last refuge of the needy and the idle. Erasmus suspected no treachery; and the tempter knew his weakness. Verden described Stein as a quiet paradise for a man of letters: his time was his own; books in abundance were at his command; accomplished friends would encourage, and assist his studies; all was

*This letter may be read among his Epistles and also in the Appendix of Jortin.

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