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THE OTHER ROOM.

My life in theirs pursues its intercourse, THIS pleasant room, you say, holds all I And theirs in mine still answers to my need; needs. Here are my books, my plants, my pic- When I have finished here my days' routures; friends tine,

Are round my hearth. Before my eyes For me that door shall open.

recede

Through the broad casement, river, hill, and mead;

And better still, at evening there ascends Twilight's one star, made to console the gloom.

There's the door where one enters; here, the fire;

What more could mortal ask or heart de

sire ?

If there be any setting of their sun,

stand

May I Not trembling, as the larger light serene, With its fresh splendors seen and unforeseen,

Strikes me upon that threshold. May my

hand

A SINGLE lark to the immense white pall

My one star charms the twilight of their That hung above the earth, embracing all,

room.

Surely with purer hearts and clearer eyes,

Sang forth his song, the first song of the year.

Linked with the old life, but with ampler As the white gloom grew dark, began the

Fuller achievement

aims,

prize

fall

the old joys they Of silent snow that lasted all night long, And when the morning came they found

2

From Temple Bar. ERASMUS AND THE REFORMATION.

sup

was originally caused by overwork in connection with its production.

tory or for literature. There is, I pose, only one other man of letters, WHEN Lord Salisbury appointed Mr. and certainly no other historian, whose Froude to be Professor Freeman's suc- death would have caused so real and cessor at Oxford, there were certain widespread a sense of loss. And his writers in the press who affected to one living rival as a master of English treat the appointment as an insult or a has long ceased to write, while Mr. joke. By this time probably they have Froude published his last, and not come to see that to send the most dis- least vigorous, volume only the other tinguished man who in our time has day. Indeed, it seems that his illness made history his life-work to fill the greatest chair of history in the English world was not, after all, so very unrea- He had held the professorship less sonable. Not that Mr. Froude was than three years, but had had time to merely a man of great ability, who hap- completely refute those who had met pened to work at history. On the con- his name with prophecies of failure. trary, he was a born historian. Few He is said to have proved an admirable men have ever received from nature a head of his faculty, and of course his fuller measure of one of the gifts most lectures attracted large audiences. But essential to a great writer of history, these were services of which only Oxthe rare narrative gift, which makes ford could reap the benefit. The outhis pages so full everywhere of move-side world will rather remember that. ment, and color, and life. And, if he he distinguished his two years' tenure was a great artist by birthright, he knew how to make himself also a great discoverer. Only historical specialists can claim to judge this part of his work; but the value of his laborious researches among the Spanish archives, opening out, as they did, almost a new world for students of English history in the sixteenth century, has been universally recognized. Still, no doubt, considering Mr. Froude's age, it was the man of genius, rather than the student, whom Lord Salisbury had in his mind when he made the appointment. Part, at least, of a professor's business is to arouse interest in his own branch of study, and for that purpose it is something to have a man who could not be uninteresting if he tried. Two distinguished historical students had held the chair before him; and there were others who could fill it after him; surely it would have been a mistake to miss the opportunity of filling the necessarily short interval with a man who was not only a student and a historian, but also a name and a force in English letters.

of the chair by the publication, first, of the brilliant lectures on English seamen, which have appeared from time to time in Longman's Magazine, and then of last year's lectures on Erasmus, which were issued in the autumn as a book.

Neither the one course, nor the other, adds much perhaps to already existing knowledge; but there must be room by the side of the book which interprets and publishes new material for that other sort of book which brings new light and new life to the old. And both show that Mr. Froude retained this latter power, which was indeed his special gift, up to the very end. There is all the old vigor and mastery of style; the strong convictions do not fail of the old trenchant and almost defiant expression; and the keen interest he takes in his subjects, which always made his work so fascinating, is as evident as ever, making us feel as if his own life and personality were bubbling up from every page. It is curious that he should have gone back in his last book to Erasmus, an old subject with him; and one can only be glad that he was able to finish a piece of work so admirable in itself, and so thoroughly congenial to his

And now his death has come to show how very short that interval was to be; and there is only one feeling about it among those who care either for his-tastes and temperament.

It is to be hoped that the new book | attract the attention Erasmus attracted. may revive something of the old inter- But perhaps that was hardly a true est in Erasmus. Few men have en- statement of the case. No one ever joyed greater reputation in life, and had more of the scholar's temperament few reputations have lived longer. than Erasmus, but a mere scholar he Among the people who wrote to him to never was. He lived and died in his ask for his advice or his society are study, and no promises of honor or office four or five successive popes, the Em- could tempt him to leave it; but there peror Charles V., Henry VIII., and were windows all round it, and his Francis I., an immense number of keen eye was forever passing through German princes great and small, and them on its travels over Europe, east cardinals, bishops, and abbots innumer- and west, and north and south. His able. He was more than once offered was not the temperament of a recluse a bishopric and once at least a cardi- who can sit in a corner of his study, nal's hat. And he was consulted by all absorbed in the task he has set himLuther and Melancthon as well as by self, and pay no more heed to the concardinals and popes. Kings contended vulsions of empires or churches outside for his presence at their courts, almost than if they were the quarrels of chilas in old days Irish tribes fought for a dren. All the political and, still more, manuscript of the Gospels, or Pisa and all the ecclesiastical questions of his Amalfi for the famous copy of Jus-time are of burning interest to Erastinian. His paraphrase of the New mus; and they appear strangely Testament was placed in every English enough, as it seems to us, in every church, and his "Colloquies " re-page of his works, not only in the mained text-books in the schools for Colloquies and the "Praise of two hundred years. And who was this Folly," but in his notes on Greek provman whose words all Europe held its erbs or texts of the Bible. He smites breath to hear? Only a learned man; the abuses of Church and State, not a mere scholar, nothing more. There only with all the sharp arrows of his is nothing quite like it in all the history wit, but also with a fiery eloquence of scholarship. What is the explana- born of real and deep enthusiasm. tion ? is the combination in him of hard work, high purpose, the most intensc conviction and the most unaffected and genuine goodness, with qualities too rarely found in such company flowing humor, a large humanity, and a willing tolerance of the views of opponents — which makes every one who reads his books or letters come near to loving him.

We shall find it, probably, where the explanation of most of human history is to be found in the inter-working of personality and environment; in the co-operation of that obscure collection of qualities, never alike in any two men, a standing miracle which no science can explain, call it self, character, personality, what you will with the circumstances in which it finds itself. Very often a man finds himself in circumstances with which his nature cannot co-operate; and then the probability is that not much history will come of the conjunction. It is when the hour and the man arrive together that great results are produced. And never were they in more complete conjunction than in the case of Erasmus; and the results were correspondingly curious and important.

I said just now that it was extraordinary that a mere scholar" should

It

over

This was the man then. Of the scholar nothing need be said. Such a man at such a moment might well attain a unique position. The tide of enthusiasm for the new learning was at the full. It had hardly risen beyond the Alps in the fifteenth century, but now it was covering Europe, and there was no scholar outside Italy who could make any pretence of being the rival of Erasmus. Much of the new love of letters, which was growing up in England and Germany and the Low Countries, was his own creation. He had

a

lived at Oxford and Louvain and | or, failing that, to the judgment of Basle, and had taught at Paris and pious and learned men. Authority Cambridge, and everywhere he had was in fact still recognized as the prinleft his spirit behind him. And that ciple of faith. And here was a man of spirit was something absolutely new. unrivalled learning, of known piety There had been dim foretastes of it and equally known moderation; perhaps in men like Pico della Miran- scholar who had deliberately devoted dola, but as a whole, and as exhibiting himself to sacred letters in preference itself on the wide European stage, it to profane, and whose books were at was an entirely new thing. Erasmus once the delight of prelates and the was the first to unite the culture of favorite study of the reformers; must Italy with the earnestness of the it not have seemed as if such a man North. were sent by God to heal the divisions of the Church?

ible and universal, not only in a common enthusiasm for the new found learning, and a common faith in the splendid future it was to bring to birth, but also, one may almost say, by the strongest of all bonds, the bond of language. The whole of the educated class could not merely read Latin, but could write and speak it. The growth in every country of the spirit of national or local patriotism, which the last three centuries have witnessed, the gradual decay of the old conception of the nations of Europe as one body under its natural head the emperor, and the complete destruction of the sister conception of the whole Church as one family under one holy father, have done a great deal to break up Europe into a number of isolated fragments; but the growth of the modern languages has done almost as much.

No one would now think of inviting a Dutch scholar to be a sort of arbiter And there was one thing more. Euof faith and morals to all Europe. Yet rope was then united, not only in the that, or something very like it, is what possession of a single Church, indivisErasmus was over and over again asked to be by members of all parties during the last twenty years of his life. It is difficult for us to conceive such a thing, but that is because it is difficult for us to realize the hopes that were placed in the new learning in the first half of the sixteenth century. The world had passed from darkness into light, and the light seemed to it by contrast far brighter than it really was. The key of all mysteries, the solution of all difficulties, old and new, was to be found in books; in the new-found wisdom of Greeks and Romans, in the return to the fathers and the primitive Church. And we forget also that Europe was one body corporate in the time of Erasmus, in a way-in more than one way indeed-in which it will never be so again. There was only one church then, and a traveller who passed from England to Germany or Italy found everywhere the very same service with which he was familiar in his Yorkshire or Devonshire home. That was one thing which made it possible for German reformers and Italian bishops to look to a single scholar to heal their differences. No one could yet contemplate the idea of a permanent schism without horror; all alike still clung to the august conception of Catholic unity. The right of private judgment was hardly heard of; at present all, even Henry VIII. and Luther, were ready to submit their innovations to the decision of a general council;

Then not only all the learned, but all the educated, were familiar with Latin. Whoever read, indeed, must read Latin; for there was little else to read. Theology, history, philosophy, all were in Latin. The national literatures were only in their cradles. Nearly a century after the time of Erasmus, Bacon deliberately buried his greater works in Latin in the hope of securing his fame; and even Milton chose Latin as the vehicle of some of the best of his early poetry, and did not abandon it without hesitation. To Erasmus it was everything; the lauguage of his tongue as well as of