"What could have been more unexpected than that I should find at Boppard an Eschenfeld, a student of my works?—a publican devoted to the Muses and to liberal learning! Christ made it a reproach to the Pharisees that harlots and publicans should go before them into the kingdom of heaven; tell me, is it not equally shameful that priests and monks should be living for luxury and the service of their bellies, while publicans are embracing the cause of liberal learning? They are consecrating themselves wholly to guzzling, while Eschenfeld divides himself between the Kaiser and his studies! You showed plainly enough what opinion you had formed of me; and I shall have done well, if the sight of me has not rubbed off a little of it.
"But, alack! alack! that jolly red wine of yours mightily tickled our boatman's wife, a full-breasted and bibulous female; she wouldn't share a drop of it, though they kept calling for some. She drank all she wanted and then what a row! She nearly slew a maid-servant with a mighty ladle and we could hardly stop the fight. Then when she got on board she went for her husband, and came near throwing him into the Rhine. There you see the power of your wine.
It is worth noticing that Erasmus represents his settlement at Louvain as the result of a freak on the part of those evil fates of which he liked to fancy himself the especial victim. To make his climax more effective he pictures the joys of meeting his Louvain friends:
"What dinners! what a welcome! what talks I was promising myself! I had decided, if the autumn should be a pleasant one, to go over to England and to accept what the king has so many times offered me—but oh! deceitful hopes of mortal men—etc!"
He has an illness of a few weeks, during most of which time he is steadily at work, and then he goes quietly back to his lodgings in the University and we hear no more of England. We know of no renewed offers from King Henry, nor indeed, so far, of any direct offers from him whatever.
While Erasmus was at Basel, he was, so he tells us, invited by Duke Ernest of Bavaria to come to his university at Ingolstadt. He speaks of this in a letter to the bishop of Rochester, as one among the numerous indications of the favour with which the first edition of the New Testament had been received. He had so many offers that he could not remember them. "Some bishop in Germany whose name I have forgotten" wanted him for his university. He knows he is unworthy of all these honours, but is pleased to find that all his pains have earned the approval of good men. "Many are now reading the sacred Scriptures who confess that they would never have read them otherwise, and many persons everywhere are beginning to study Greek."
In a letter[111] to Ammonius from Brussels in 1516 Erasmus tells of an offer of a bishopric in Sicily:
"Do you want to laugh? When I got back to Brussels, I went to call on my Mæcenas, the chancellor [Selvagius]. He turned to the councillors who were standing about and said: 'This man doesn't know yet what a great man he is." Then to me: 'The Prince is trying to make you a bishop and had already given you a very desirable see in Sicily. But then he discovered that this see was on the list of those which are called "reserved," and has written to the pope to get his approval for you.' When I heard this, I could not help laughing; yet I am glad to know the good feeling of the king towards me—or rather of the chancellor, who, in this matter, is the king himself."
Somewhat less apocryphal than these stories is the report of an offer from King Francis I. of France. It comes to us in a letter written by the French scholar, William Budæus, to Erasmus while he was in the Low Countries. Budæus says that William Parvus (Guillaume Petit), an ecclesiastic who stood very near the king, had told him that one day in the course of a conversation about literary men, the king had expressed his determination[112]
"to gather the choicest spirits into his kingdom by the most ample rewards and to found in France a seminary, if I may so call it, of scholars. Parvus had long been watching for such an opportunity, being not merely a supporter of all learning, but also a special admirer of yours, and said that in his opinion Erasmus ought to be invited the very first one, and that this could most properly be done by Budæus ... and finally, that the king, moved by some noble impulse, was brought to the point of saying that this offer should be made to you by me in his name: that if you could be persuaded to come here to live and devote yourself to literary work here as you are wont to do over there, he would promise to give you a living worth a thousand francs and more. Now you understand that my influence comes in only so far as I assume the part of a mediator, not of a sponsor, and simply pass on to you in good faith what I have heard from Parvus."