Such a shock as Grocyn’s discovery must have been to him, may have simply produced in his mind a sense of bewilderment ending in a suspended judgment. He may have returned to his accustomed work feeling more than ever the uncertainty of human speculations, an humbler, a stronger, though perhaps a sadder man, more than ever inclined to cling closely to the Scriptures and his beloved St. Paul, and even ready sometimes to turn with relief, as we are told he did with admiration, from the involved logic[180] of the Apostle to the simple majesty of Christ!
CHAPTER III.
I. ERASMUS COMES TO OXFORD (1498).
The character of Erasmus.
In the spring or summer of 1498, the foreign scholar—Erasmus of Rotterdam—arrived at Oxford, brought over to England by Lord Mountjoy from Paris.[181] Erasmus was an entire stranger in England; he did not know a word of English, but was at once most hospitably received into the College of St. Mary the Virgin, by the prior Richard Charnock. Colet had indeed, as already mentioned, heard Erasmus spoken of at Paris as a learned scholar,[182] but as yet no work of his had risen into note, nor was even his name generally known. He was scarcely turned thirty—just the age of Colet;[183] but in his wasted sallow cheeks and sunken eyes were but few traces left of the physical vigour of early manhood. In place of the glow of health and strength, were lines which told that midnight oil, bad lodging, and the harassing life of a poor student, driven about and ill-served as he had been, had already broken what must have been at best a frail constitution. But the worn scabbard told of the sharpness and temper of the steel within. His was a mind restless for mental work, now fighting through the obstacles of ill-health and poverty, in pursuit of its natural bent, as it had once had to fight its way out of monastic thraldom to secure the freedom of action which such a mind required.
His object in coming to Oxford.
Though well schooled and stored with learning, yet he had not come to Oxford to teach, or to make a name by display of intellectual power, but simply to add new branches of knowledge to those already acquired. Greek was now to be learned there—thanks to the efforts of Grocyn and Linacre—and Erasmus had come to Oxford bent upon adding a knowledge of Greek to his Latin lore. To belong to that little knot of men north of the Alps who already knew Greek—whose number yet might be counted on his fingers—this had now become his immediate object of ambition. What he meant to do with his tools when he had got them, probably was a question to be decided by circumstances rather than by any very definite plan of his own. To gain his living by taking pupils, and to live the life of a scholar at some continental university, was probably the future floating indistinctly before him.