[585] Nihil omnino convenit inter aquilam et vulpem, quanquam id sane non mediocri vulpinæ gentis malo; quo tamen haud scio an dignæ videri debeant, quæ quondam leporibus συμμαχιαν adversus aquilam petentibus auxilium negarint, ut refertur in Annalibus Quadrupedum, a quibus Homerus Βατραχομυομαχιαν mutuatus est.... Neque vero mirum quod illi parum convenit cum oloribus, ave nimirum poetica; illud mirum, ab iis sæpenumero vinci tam pugnacem belluam.
[586] Ex universis avibus una aquila viris tam sapientibus idonea visa est, quæ regis imaginem repræsentet, nec formosa, nec canora, nec esculenta, sed carnivora, rapax, prædatrix, populatrix, bellatrix, solitaria, invisa omnibus, pestis omnium; quæ cum plurimum nocere possit, plus tamen velit quam possit.
45. But the eagle is only one of the animals in the proverb. After all this bile against those the royal bird represents, he does not forget the beetles. These of course are the monks, whose picture he draws with equal bitterness and more contempt. Here, however, it becomes difficult to follow the analogy, as he runs a little wildly into mythological tales of the Scarabæus, not easily reduced to his purpose. This he discloses at length: “There are a wretched class of men, of low degree, yet full of malice; not less dingy, nor less filthy, nor less vile than beetles; who nevertheless by a certain obstinate malignity of disposition, though they can never do good to any mortal, become frequently troublesome to the great. They frighten by their ugliness, they molest by their noise, they offend by their stench; they buzz round us, they cling to us, they lie in ambush for us, so that it is often better to be at enmity with powerful men than to attack those beetles, whom it is a disgrace even to overcome, and whom no one can either shake off, or encounter, without some pollution.”[587]
[587] Sunt homunculi quidam, infimæ quidem sortis, sed tamen malitiosi, non minus atri quam scarabæi, neque minus putidi, neque minus abjecti; qui tamen pertinaci quadam ingenii malitia, cum nulli omnino mortalium prodesse possint, magnis etiam sæpenumero viris facessunt negotium. Territant nigrore, obstrepunt stridore, obturbant fœtore; circumvolitant, hærent, insidiantur, ut non paulo satius sit cum magnis aliquando viris simultatem suscipere, quam hos lacessere scarabæos, quos pudeat etiam vicisse, quosque nec excutere possis, neque conflictari cum illis queas, nisi discedas contaminatior. Chil. iii. cent. vii. 1.
In a letter to Budæus, Ep. ccli., Erasmus boasts of his παρρησια in the Adages, naming the most poignant of them; but says, in proverbio αετον κανθαρος μαιευεται, plane lusimus ingenio. This proverb, and that entitled Sileni Alcibiadis, had appeared before 1515; for they were reprinted in that year by Frobenius, separately from the other Adages, as appears by a letter of Beatus Rhenanus in Appendice ad Erasm. Epist. Ep. xxviii. Zasius, a famous jurist, alludes to them in another letter, Ep. xxvii., praising “fluminosas disserendi undas amplificationis immensam ubertatem.” And this, in truth, is the character of Erasmus’s style. The Sileni Alcibiadis were also translated into English, and published by John Gough; see Dibdin’s Typographical Antiquities, article 1433.
There is not a little severity in the remarks Erasmus makes on princes and nobles in the Moriæ Encomium. But with them he seems through life to have been a privileged person.
46. It must be admitted, that this was not the language to conciliate; and we might almost commiserate the sufferance of the poor beetles thus trod upon; but Erasmus knew that the regular clergy were not to be conciliated, and resolved to throw away the scabbard. With respect to his invectives against kings, they proceeded undoubtedly, like those, less intemperately expressed, of his friend More in the Utopia, from a just sense of the oppression of Europe in that age by ambitious and selfish rulers. Yet the very freedom of his animadversions seems to plead a little in favour of these tyrants, who, if they had been as thorough birds of prey as he represents them, might easily have torn to pieces the author of this somewhat outrageous declamation, whom on the contrary they honoured and maintained. In one of the passages above quoted, he has introduced, certainly in a later edition, a limitation of his tyrannicidal doctrine, if not a palinodia, in an altered key. “Princes,” he says, “must be endured, lest tyranny should give way to anarchy, a still greater evil. This has been demonstrated by the experience of many states; and lately the insurrection of the German boors has taught us, that the cruelty of princes is better to be borne than the universal confusion of anarchy.” I have quoted these political ebullitions rather diffusely, as they are, I believe, very little known, and have given the original in my notes, that I may be proved to have no way over-coloured the translation, and also that a fair specimen may be presented of the eloquence of Erasmus, who has seldom an opportunity of expressing himself with so much elevation, but whose rapid, fertile, and lively, though not very polished style, is hardly more exhibited in these paragraphs, than in the general character of his writings.
His Greek Testament. 47. The whole thoughts of Erasmus began now to be occupied with his great undertaking, an edition of the Greek Testament with explanatory annotations and a continued paraphrase. Valla, indeed, had led the inquiry as a commentator; and the Greek text without notes was already printed at Alcala by direction of Cardinal Ximenes; though this edition, commonly styled the Complutensian, did not appear till 1522. That of Erasmus was published at Basle in 1516. It is strictly therefore the princeps editio. He employed the press of Frobenius, with whom he lived in friendship. Many years of his life were spent at Basle.
Patrons of letters in Germany. 48. The public, in a general sense of the word, was hardly yet recovered enough from its prejudices to give encouragement to letters. But there were not wanting noble patrons who, besides the immediate advantages of their favour, bestowed a much greater indirect benefit on literature, by making it honourable in the eyes of mankind. Learning, which is held pusillanimous by the soldier, unprofitable by the merchant, and pedantic by the courtier, stands in need of some countenance from those before whom all three bow down; wherever at least, which is too commonly the case, a conscious self-respect does not sustain the scholar against the indifference or scorn of the prosperous vulgar. Italy was then, and perhaps has been ever since, the soil where literature, if it has not always most flourished, has stood highest in general estimation. But in Germany also, at this time, the emperor Maximilian, whose character is neither to be estimated by the sarcastic humour of the Italians, nor by the fond partiality of his countrymen, and especially his own, in his self-delineation of Der Weisse König, the Wise King, but really a brave and generous man of lively talents, Frederic, justly denominated the Wise, elector of Saxony, Joachim elector of Brandeburg, Albert archbishop of Mentz, were prominent among the friends of genuine learning. The university of Wittenberg, founded by the second of these princes in 1502, rose in this decade to great eminence, not only as the birthplace of the Reformation, but as the chief school of philological and philosophical literature. That of Frankfort on the Oder was established by the elector of Brandeburg in 1506.
Resistance to learning. 49. The progress of learning, however, was not to be a march through a submissive country. Ignorance, which had much to lose, and was proud as well as rich, ignorance in high places, which is always incurable, because it never seeks for a cure, set itself sullenly and stubbornly against the new teachers. The Latin language, taught most barbarously through books whose very titles, Floresta, Mammotrectus, Doctrinale Puerorum, Gemma Gemmarum, bespeak their style,[588] with the scholastic logic and divinity in wretched compends, had been held sufficient for all education. Those who had learned nothing else could of course teach nothing else, and saw their reputation and emoluments gone all at once by the introduction of philological literature and real science. Through all the palaces of Ignorance went forth a cry of terror at the coming light—“A voice of weeping heard and loud lament.” The aged giant was roused from his sleep, and sent his dark hosts of owls and bats to the war. One man above all the rest, Erasmus, cut them to pieces with irony or invective. They stood in the way of his noble zeal for the restoration of letters.[589] He began his attack in his Encomium Moriæ, the praise of folly. This was addressed to Sir Thomas More, and published in 1511. Eighteen hundred copies were printed, and speedily sold; though the book wanted the attraction that some later editions possess, the curious and amusing engravings from designs of Holbein. It is a poignant satire against all professions of men and even against princes and peers; but the chief objects are the mendicant orders of monks. “Though this sort of men,” he says, “are so detested by everyone, that it is reckoned unlucky so much as to meet them by accident, they think nothing equal to themselves, and hold it a proof of their consummate piety, if they are so illiterate as not to be able to read. And when their asinine voices bray out in the churches their psalms, which they can count, but not understand,[590] then it is they fancy that the ears of the saints above are enraptured with the harmony;” and so forth.