thought best for me. Formerly, when a youth, I remember I used to tremble at the very name of death! . . . . A.D. 1518.death! The sweating sick ness. Death of Ammonius. Had Erasmus fallen a victim to the plague and died at the house of Martins the printer, as the friar had reported, and the convivial monks had too readily believed, it does not seem likely that his death would have been as dark and godless as they fancied it might have been. As it was, instead of dying without lighted tapers and crucifix and transubstantiated wafer, or, in monkish jargon, 'sine lux, sine crux, sine Deus,' their enemy still lived, and the disappointed monks, instead of ill-concealed rejoicings over his death, were obliged to content themselves for many years to come with muttering in quite another tone, 'It were good for that 'man if he had never been born.'1 II. MORE AT THE COURT OF HENRY VIII. (1518). While the plague had been raging in Germany, the sweating sickness had been continuing its ravages in England. Before More left for Calais it had struck down, after a few days' illness, Ammonius, with whom Erasmus and More had long enjoyed intimate friendship. Wolsey also had narrowly escaped with his life, after repeated attacks. When More returned from the embassy he found the sickness still raging. In the spring of 1518 the court was removed to Abingdon, to escape the contagion of the great city; and whilst there, More, who now was obliged to follow the King wherever he might go, had to busy himself with pre 1 Eras. Op. iii. 1490, D. Brewer, ii. Nos. 3670, 3671, dated Sept. 1517. cautionary measures to prevent its spread in Oxford, СНАР. where it had made its appearance.1 XVI. Whilst at Abingdon, he was called upon, also, to in- 'A.D. 1518. terfere with his influence to quiet a foolish excitement which had seized the students at Oxford. It was not the spread of the sweating sickness which had caused their alarm; but the increasing taste for the study of Greek had roused the fears of divines of the old school. The enemies of the 'new learning' had raised a faction against it. The students had taken sides, calling themselves Greeks and Trojans, and, not content with wordy Greeks and Trojans at warfare, they had come to open and public insult. At Oxford. length, the most virulent abuse had been poured upon the Greek language and literature, even from the university pulpit, by an impudent and ignorant preacher. He had denounced all who favoured Greek studies as 'heretics;' in his coarse phraseology, those who taught the obnoxious language were diabolos maximos' and . its students diabolos minutulos.' 6 More, upon hearing what had been passing, wrote a letter of indignant but respectful remonstrance to the university authorities. 2 He and Pace interested the King also in the affair, and at their suggestion he took occasion to express his royal pleasure that the students 'would do well to devote themselves with energy and 'spirit to the study of Greek literature;' and so, says Erasmus, silence was imposed upon these brawlers.' 3 On another occasion the King and his courtiers had attended Divine service. The court preacher had, like the Oxford divine, indulged in abuse of Greek litera 6 1 Brewer, preface, ccxi. p. 662-667. 3 Eras. Op. iii. p. 408, b. CHAP. ture and the modern school of interpretation-having Erasmus and his New Testament in his eye. Pace A.D. 1518. looked at the King to see what he thought of it. The King answered his look with a satirical smile. After the sermon the divine was ordered to attend upon the King. It was arranged that More should reply to the arguments he had urged against Greek literature. After he had done so, the divine, instead of replying to his arguments, dropped down on his knees before the King, and simply prayed for forgiveness, urging, however, by way of extenuating his fault, that he was carried away by the spirit in his sermon when he poured forth all this abuse of the Greek language. 'But,' the King here observed, that spirit was not the spirit of Christ, but the spirit of foolishness.' He then asked the preacher what works of Erasmus he had 6 6 A foolish read. He had not read any. Then,' said the King, preacher' at Court. you prove yourself to be a fool, for you condemn So far, then, from More's new position having extinguished his own opinions or changed his views, he had the satisfaction of being able now and then to H advance the interests of the new learning,' and to act CHAP. III. THE EVENING OF COLET'S LIFE (1518-19). The sweating sickness continued its ravages in Eng- The sweating land, striking down one here and another there with sickness. merciless rapidity. It was generally fatal on the first day. If the patient survived twenty-four hours he was looked upon as out of danger. But it was liable to recur, and sometimes attacked the same person four times in succession. This was the case with Cardinal Wolsey; whilst several of the royal retinue were attacked and carried off at once, Wolsey's strong constitution carried him through four successive attacks. 1 times During the period of its ravages Colet was three Colet three times attacked by it and survived, but with a consti- attacked tution so shattered, and with symptoms so premonitory by it. of consumptive tendencies, as to suggest to him that the time might not be far distant when he too must follow after his twenty-one brothers and sisters, and leave his aged mother the survivor of all her children. Meanwhile an accidental ray of light falls here and there upon the otherwise obscure life of Colet during these years of peril, revealing little pictures, too beautiful in their simple consistency with all else we know of him to be passed by unheeded. The first glimpse we get of Colet reveals him engaged in the careful and final completion of the rules and statutes by which his school was to be governed after his own death. Having spent a good part of his life and his fortune in the foundation of this school, as the 1 Four Years at the Court of Henry VIII. ii. p. 127. CHAP. best means of promoting the cause which he had so deeply at heart, one might have expected that he would A.D. 1518. have tried, in fixing his statutes, to give permanence and perpetuity to his own views. This is what most people try to do by endowments of this kind. No sooner do most reformers clear away a little ground, and discover what they take to be truths, than they attempt, by organising a sect, founding endowments, and framing articles and trust-deeds, to secure the permanent tradition of their own views to posterity in the form in which they are apprehended by themselves. Hence, in the very act of striking off the fetters of the past, they are often forging the fetters of the future. Even the Protestant Reformers, whilst on the one hand bravely breaking the yoke under which their ancestors had lived in bondage, ended by fixing another on the neck of their posterity. Those who remained in the old bondage found themselves, as the result of the Reformation, bound still tighter under Tridentine decrees; whilst those who had joined the exodus, and entered the promised land of the Reformers, found it to be a land of almost narrower boundaries than the one they had left. Freed from Papal thraldom it might be, but bound down by an Augustinian theology as rigid and dogmatic as that from which they had escaped. If Colet did not do likewise, he resisted with singular wisdom and success a temptation which besets every one under his circumstances. That Colet strove to found no sect of his own has already been seen. If the movement which he had done so much to set agoing had produced its fruits-if a school or party had been the result he had not called it, or felt it to be, in any way his own; he might call it Erasmican' in joke, and leave Erasmus indignantly to repudiate 'that name of |