CHAPTER IX.
I. ERASMUS LEAVES CAMBRIDGE, AND MEDITATES LEAVING ENGLAND (1513-14).
Erasmus at Cambridge.
His real work.
The New Testament and St. Jerome.
During the autumn of 1513 Erasmus made up his mind to leave Cambridge. He had come to England on the accession of Henry VIII. with full purpose to make it his permanent home.[456] That his friends would try to bring this about had been his last entreaty on leaving England for his visit to Italy. They had done their best for him. They had found all who cared for the advance of learning anxious to secure the residence of so great a scholar in their own country. The promises were indeed vague, but there were plenty of them, and altogether the chances of a fair maintenance for Erasmus had appeared to be good. He had settled at Cambridge intending to earn his living by teaching Greek to the students; expecting, from them and from the University, fees and a stipend sufficient to enable him to pay his way. But the drudgery of teaching Greek was by no means the work upon which Erasmus had set his heart. It was rather, like St. Paul’s tent-making, the price he had to pay for that leisure which he was bent upon devoting to his real work. This work was his fellow-work with Colet. Apart from the aid he was able to give to his friend, by taking up the cudgels for him at the University, and finding him teachers and schoolbooks for his school—for all this was done by-the-bye—he was labouring to make his own proper contribution towards the object to which both were devoting their all. He was labouring hard to produce an edition of the New Testament in the original Greek, with a new and free translation of his own, and simultaneously with this a corrected edition of the works of St. Jerome—the latter in itself an undertaking of enormous labour.
In letters written from Cambridge during the years 1511-1513, we catch stray glimpses of the progress of these great works. He writes to Colet, in August 1511, that ‘he is about attacking St. Paul,’[457] and in July 1512, that he has finished collating the New Testament, and is attacking St. Jerome.[458]
To Ammonius, in the camp, during the French campaign of 1513, he writes that he is working with almost superhuman zeal at the correction of the text of St. Jerome; and shortly after the close of the campaign against France, he tells his friend that ‘he himself has been waging no less fierce a warfare with the blunders of Jerome.’[459] And now, with his editions of the New Testament and Jerome nearly ready for the press, why should he waste any further time at Cambridge? He had complained from the first that he could get nothing out of the students.[460] All these years he had been, in spite of all his efforts, and notwithstanding an annual stipend secured upon a living in Kent, through the kindness of Warham, to a great extent dependent on his friends, obliged most unwillingly to beg, till he had become thoroughly ashamed of begging.[461] And now this autumn of 1513 had brought matters to a crisis. At Michaelmas the University had agreed to pay him thirty nobles,[462] and, on September 1, they had begged the assistance of Lord Mountjoy in the payment of this ‘enormous stipend’ for their Greek professor, adding, by way of pressing the urgency of their claim, that they must otherwise soon lose him.[463]
On November 28, Erasmus wrote to Ammonius that he had for some months lived like a cockle shut up in his shell, humming over his books. Cambridge, he said, was deserted because of the plague; and even when all the men were there, there was no large company. The expense was intolerable, the profits not a brass farthing. The last five months had, he said, cost him sixty nobles, but he had never received more than one from his audience. He was going to throw out his sheet-anchor this winter. If successful he would make his nest, if not he would flit.[464]
Erasmus leaves Cambridge.
The result was that in the winter of 1513-14 Erasmus finally left Cambridge. The disbanding of disaffected and demoralised soldiers had so increased the number of robbers on the public roads,[465] that travelling in the winter months was considered dangerous; but Erasmus was anxious to proceed with the publication of his two great works. He was in London by February, 1514.