It is not easy to realise the toil of such a journey to a jaded delicate scholar, already complaining of the infirmities of age, though as yet not forty. Strange places, too, for a fastidious student were the roadside inns of Germany, of which Erasmus has left so vivid a picture, and into which he turned his weary head each successive night, after grooming his own horse in the stable. One room serves for all comers, and in this one room, heated like a stove, some eighty or ninety guests have already stowed themselves—boots, baggage, dirt and all. Their wet clothes hang on the stove iron to dry, while they wait for their supper. There are footmen and horsemen, merchants, sailors, waggoners, husbandmen, children, and women—sound and sick—combing their heads, wiping their brows, cleaning their boots, stinking of garlic, and making as great a confusion of tongues as there was at the building of Babel! At length, in the midst of the din and stifling closeness of this heated room, supper is spread—a coarse and ill-cooked meal—which our scholar scarcely dares to touch, and yet is obliged to sit out to the end for courtesy’s sake. And when past midnight Erasmus is shown to his bedchamber, he finds it to be rightly named—there is nothing in it but a bed; and the last and hardest task of the day is now to find between its rough unwashed sheets some chance hours of repose.
Journey over the Alps.
So, almost in his own words,[322] did Erasmus fare on his way to Italy. Nor did comforts increase as Germany was left behind. For as the party crossed the Alps, the courier quarrelled with the tutor, and they even came to blows. After this, Erasmus was too angry with both to enjoy the company of either, and so rode apart, composing verses on those infirmities of age which he felt so rapidly encroaching upon his own frail constitution.[323] At length the Italian frontier was reached, and Erasmus, as Luther did three or four years after,[324] began the painful task of realising what that Italy was about which he had so long and so ardently dreamed.
Erasmus in Italy.
Erasmus returns to England.
It is not needful here to trace Erasmus through all his Italian experience. It presents a catalogue of disappointments and discomforts upon which we need not dwell. How his arrangement with the sons of Baptista, having lasted a year, came to an end, and with it the most unpleasant year of his life;[325] how he took his doctor’s degree at Turin; how he removed to Bologna to find the city besieged by Roman armies,[326] headed by Pope Julius himself; how he visited Florence[327] and Rome;[328] how he went to Venice to superintend a new edition of the ‘Adagia;’ how he was flattered, and how many honours he was promised, and how many of these promises he found to be, as injuries ought to be, written on sand;—these and other particulars of his Italian experience may be left to the biographer of Erasmus. In 1509, on the accession of Henry VIII. to the English throne, the friends of Erasmus sent him a pressing invitation to return to England,[329] which he gladly accepted. For our present purpose it were better, therefore, to see him safely on his horse again, toiling back on the same packhorse roads, lodging at the same roadside inns, and meeting the same kind of people as before, but his face now, after three or four years’ absence, set towards England, where there are hearts he can trust, whether he can or cannot those in Rome, and where once again, safely housed with More, he can write and talk to Colet as he pleases, and forget in the pleasures of the present the toils and disappointments of the past.[330]
‘Praise of Folly.’
For what most concerns the history of the Oxford Reformers is this—that it was to beguile these journeys that Erasmus conceived the idea of his ‘Praise of Folly,’ a satire upon the follies of the times which had grown up within him at these wayside inns, as he met in them men of all classes and modes of life, and the keen edge of which was whetted by his recent visit to Italy and Rome.[331] What most concerns the subject of these pages is the mental result of the Italian journey, and it was not long before it was known in almost every wayside inn in Europe.
IV. MORE RETURNS TO PUBLIC LIFE ON THE ACCESSION OF HENRY VIII. (1509-10).
But little can be known of what happened to Colet and More during the absence of Erasmus in Italy.
That Colet was devoted to the work of his Deanery may well be imagined.