It is worth while to examine in detail the work that he completed during this period on the Letters of Jerome and the New Testament. One afternoon in Oxford in 1499 he had had a long discussion with Colet, and in the course of it had argued strongly against a point of view which Colet had derived from Jerome. Whether this set him on to read Jerome again—he was already quite familiar with him—is not clear; but a year later, when he was hard at work in Paris, he was already engaged upon correcting the text of Jerome, and adding a commentary, being specially interested in the Letters. So far did his admiration carry him that he writes to a friend, 'I am perhaps biased; but when I compare Cicero's style with Jerome's, I seem to feel something lacking in the prince of eloquence himself'. After he left Paris in 1501, we hear no more of Jerome till 1511. It may therefore fairly be argued that his early work was done on manuscripts found in Paris libraries, very likely those of the great abbeys of St. Victor or St. Germain-des-Prés.
Subsequently, in Cambridge, he again had access to manuscripts and completed his recension of the Letters. Robert Aldridge, a young Fellow of King's, afterwards Bishop of Carlisle, speaks of working with him at Jerome in Queens', probably helping him in collation. An early catalogue of the Queens' library does not contain any mention of Jerome, so that Erasmus had probably borrowed his manuscripts from elsewhere—perhaps, like those of the New Testament, from the Chapter Library at St. Paul's; for later on, when the book was in the press, he returned from Basle to England to consult the manuscripts again, and there is no reason to suppose that during his brief stay—not a full month—he went outside London. If this surmise were correct, the destruction of St. Paul's library in the fires of 1561 and 1666 would explain why so little has been discovered about the manuscripts which Erasmus had for his Jerome. He himself, in his prefaces, gives little indication of them, beyond saying that they were very old and mutilated, and that some of them were written in Lombardic and Gothic characters. Perhaps some day a student of Jerome will arise who will be able to throw light on the matter from examination of the text at which Erasmus arrived.
To the New Testament—the other work which occupied his time at Cambridge—he had also turned his attention shortly after his return to Paris in 1500, beginning a commentary on the Epistles of St. Paul. At the first start he wrote four volumes of it, but then for some reason threw it aside, and never completed it, though his mind recurred to it at intervals; and on one occasion after a fall from his horse, in which he injured his spine, he vowed to St. Paul that he would finish it, if he recovered. Probably he felt that his vow was redeemed by his Paraphrases of the New Testament, which he wrote a few years later, beginning with St. Paul, and completing the Epistles before he undertook the Gospels.
His next work on the New Testament came to him at Louvain in 1504. Walking out one day to the Abbey of Parc, outside the town—a house of White Canons, Erasmus himself being a Black—he came upon a manuscript in their library, the Annotations of Valla on the New Testament. There was an affinity between his mind and that of the famous scholar-canon of St. John Lateran, who, in spite of his dependence on Papal patronage and favour, had been unable to keep his tongue from asking awkward questions, from inquiring even into the authenticity of the Donation of Constantine. Erasmus read the Annotations and liked their critical, scholarly tone, and the frequent citations of the original Greek. With the characteristic generosity of the age he was allowed to carry the manuscript away and print it in Paris, with a dedication to an Englishman, Christopher Fisher, perhaps a kinsman of the Bishop of Rochester.
From Paris he wrote to Colet to report progress, saying that he had learnt Greek and was ready to turn to the Scriptures, and asking him to interest English patrons in their common work. By this time Colet himself had become a patron, having been appointed Dean of St. Paul's. It is therefore not surprising to find that within a year Erasmus was established in London, living in a bishop's house, endowed by his old pupil Lord Mountjoy, and rejoicing in the society of the learned friends gathered in the capital. Chief among these was Colet, who lent him manuscripts from the Chapter Library of St. Paul's, and provided a copyist to write out the fruits of his labours, a one-eyed Brabantine, Peter Meghen by name, who acted also as Colet's private letter-carrier. Meghen wrote a bold, well-marked hand, which is easily recognizable, and in consequence his work has been traced in many libraries. The British Museum has a treatise of Chrysostom, translated by Selling, and written by Meghen for Urswick, afterwards Dean of Windsor and Rector of Hackney, to present to Prior Goldstone of Canterbury. (Urswick was frequently sent on embassies, and had doubtless enjoyed the hospitality of Christchurch on his way between London and Dover.) At Wells there are a Psalter and a translation of Chrysostom on St. Matthew, which Urswick, as executor to Sir John Huddelston, knight, caused Meghen to write in 1514 for presentation to the Cistercians of Hailes, in Gloucestershire. The Bodleian has a treatise written by him in 1528 for Nicholas Kratzer to present to Henry VIII; and Wolsey's Lectionary at Christ Church, Oxford, is probably in Meghen's hand.
But what concern us here are some manuscripts in the British Museum and the University Library at Cambridge, written by Meghen in 1506 and 1509 at Colet's order for presentation to his father, Sir Henry Colet, Lord Mayor of London, and containing in parallel columns the Vulgate and another Latin translation of the New Testament, 'per D. Erasmum Roterodamum'. Part and possibly all of this work was done by Erasmus, therefore, during this second residence in England in 1505-6. He tells us that he received two Latin manuscripts from Colet, which he found exceedingly difficult to decipher; but one cannot make a new translation from the Latin. To the Greek manuscripts used on this occasion he gives no clue.
In connexion with this help and encouragement shown by Colet as Dean to a foreign scholar, it is worth while to mention the visit to London in 1509 of Cornelius Agrippa, the famous philosopher and scientist, who had been sent to England by Maximilian on a diplomatic errand, which he describes as 'a very secret business'. During his stay, which lasted into 1510, he tells us that 'I laboured much over the Epistles of St. Paul, in the company of John Colet, a man most learned in Catholic doctrine, and of the purest life; and from him I learnt many things that I did not know'. Erasmus was in England at the time of this visit of Agrippa; but unfortunately he makes no allusion to it, neither in his life of Colet, nor in his later correspondence with Agrippa, nor, so far as I know, elsewhere in his works. If he had done so, it might have solved a problem which is very curious in the case of a public man of his fame and position, and of whom so much is otherwise known. From the autumn of 1509, when he returned from Italy and wrote the Praise of Folly in More's house in Bucklersbury, until April 1511, when he went to Paris to print it, Erasmus completely disappears from view. He published nothing, no letter that he wrote survives, we have no clue to his movements. If it had been any one else, we might almost conjecture that, like Hermonymus, he was in prison. It was just during this period that Cornelius Agrippa was in London. If either had mentioned the other, we should have a spark to illumine this singular belt of darkness.
When Erasmus returned to Cambridge in 1511, he was already familiar with the field in which he was going to work; but the precise order in which his scheme unfolded itself, whether the Greek text was his first aim or an afterthought, is not clear, his utterances being perhaps intentionally ambiguous. During these three years in Cambridge he refers occasionally to the 'collation' and 'castigation' of the New Testament, so that evidently he was engaged with the four Greek manuscripts, which, according to an introduction in his first edition, he had before him for his first recension. One of these has been identified, the Leicester Codex written by Emmanuel of Constantinople, which, as already mentioned, was with the Franciscans at Cambridge early in the sixteenth century.
By 1514 he was ready. In the last three years he had completed Jerome and the New Testament, and had also prepared for the press some of Seneca's philosophical writings, from manuscripts at King's and Peterhouse; besides lesser pieces of work. A difficulty arose about the printing. In 1512 he had been in negotiation with Badius Ascensius of Paris to undertake Jerome and a new edition of the Adagia. What actually happened is not known. But in December 1513 he writes to an intimate friend that he has been badly treated about the Adagia by an agent—a travelling bookseller, who acted as go-between for printers and authors and public; that instead of taking them to Badius and offering him the refusal, the knavish fellow had gone straight to Basle and sold them, with some other work of Erasmus, to a printer who had only just completed an edition of the Adagia. Erasmus' indignation does not ring true. It is highly probable that he was in search of a printer with greater resources than Badius, who as yet had produced nothing of any importance in Greek, and would therefore be unable to do justice to the New Testament; and that accordingly he had commissioned the agent to negotiate with a firm which by now had established a great reputation—that of Amorbach and Froben, in Basle. His attention had perhaps been aroused by a flattering mention of him in a preface written in Froben's name for the pirated edition of the Adagia, August 1513, to which Erasmus was referring in the letter just quoted. Rumour had spread through Europe that Erasmus was dead—it was repeated six months later in a book printed at Vienna—and the Basle circle deplored the loss that this would mean to learning.
There were other reasons for this choice, apart from the excellence of the printers. Erasmus had never been happy in Paris. He had often been ill beside the sluggish Seine, and had only found his health again by leaving it. The theologians were still predominant there, and Louis XII had a way of interfering with scholars who discovered any freedom of thought. Standonck, for instance, the refounder of Montaigu, had had to disappear in 1499-1500. For Erasmus to sit in Paris for two or three years while his books were being printed, would have been at least a penance. But Basle was very different. The Rhine, dashing against the piers of the bridge which joined the Great and Little towns, brought fresh air and coolness and health. The University, founded in 1460, was active and liberally minded. The town had recently (1501) thrown in its lot with the confederacy of Swiss cantons, thereby strengthening the political immunity which it had long enjoyed. Between the citizens and the religious orders complete concord prevailed; and finally, except Paris, there was no town North of the Alps which could vie with Basle in the splendour and number of the books which it produced. This is how a contemporary scholar[1] writes of the city of his adoption. 'Basle to-day is a residence for a king. The streets are clean, the houses uniform and pleasant, some of them even magnificent, with spacious courts and gay gardens and many delightful prospects; on to the grounds and trees beside St. Peter's, over the Dominicans', or down to the Rhine. There is nothing to offend the taste even of those who have been in Italy, except perhaps the use of stoves instead of fires, and the dirt of the inns, which is universal throughout Germany. The climate is singularly mild and agreeable, and the citizens polite. A bridge joins the two towns, and the situation on the river is splendid. Truly Basle is βασιλεια, a queen of cities.'