‘I scarcely can get any letters, wherefore I have showered down curses on the head of this letter-carrier, by whose laziness or treachery I fancy it must be that I have been disappointed of the most eagerly expected letters of my dear More (Mori mei). For that you have failed on your part I neither want nor ought to suspect. Albeit, I expostulated with you most vehemently in my last letter. Nor am I afraid that you are at all offended by the liberty I took, for you are not ignorant of that Spartan method of fighting “usque ad cutem.” This, joking aside, I do entreat you, sweetest Thomas, that you will make amends with interest for the suffering occasioned me by the too long continued deprivation of yourself and your letters. I expect, in short, not a letter, but a huge bundle of letters, which would weigh down even an Egyptian porter,’
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‘Vale jucundissime More.[208]
‘Oxoniæ: Natali Simonis et Judæ. 1499.’
Friendship between More and Erasmus.
Such being the friendship already existing between them, and beginning to show itself in the use of those endearing superlatives without which Erasmus, from the first to the last, never could write a letter to More, it is not surprising that, as winter came on, Erasmus should take the opportunity afforded by the approaching vacation for a visit to London. Accordingly we get one chance glimpse of him there, writing a letter to one of his friends, and expressing his delight with everything he had met with in England.
Staying as he most likely was with Mountjoy or with More, enjoying the warmth of their friendship, and feeling himself at home in London as he had done in Oxford, but never had done before anywhere else, it was natural that the foreign scholar should paint, in the warmest colours, this land of friends. Especially of Mountjoy, who had brought him to England, and who found him the means of living at Oxford, he would naturally speak in the highest terms. Such was the politeness, the goodnature, and affectionateness of his noble patron, that he would willingly follow him, he said, ad inferos, if need be.
Erasmus delighted with England, and with Mountjoy, Colet, Grocyn, Linacre, and More.
Erasmus falls in love with More.
Nor was it only the warm-heartedness of his English friends which filled him with delight. His purpose in coming to Oxford he declared to be fully answered. He had come to England because he could not raise the means for a longer journey to Italy. To prosecute his studies in Italy had been for years an object of anxious yearning; but now, after a few months’ experience of Oxford life, he wrote to his friend, who was himself going to Italy, ‘that he had found in England so much polish and learning—not showy, shallow learning, but profound and exact, both in Latin and Greek—that now he would hardly care much about going to Italy at all, except for the sake of having been there.’ ‘When,’ he added, ‘I listen to my friend Colet it seems to me like listening to Plato himself. In Grocyn, who does not admire the wide range of his knowledge? What could be more searching, deep, and refined than the judgment of Linacre?’ And after this mention of Colet, Grocyn, and Linacre, he adds: ‘Whenever did nature mould a character more gentle, endearing, and happy than Thomas More’s?’[209]
So that while here, as elsewhere, Colet seems to take his place again as the chief of the little band of English friends, we learn from this letter that the picture would not have been complete without the figure of the fascinating youth with whom Erasmus, like the rest of them, had fallen in love.