everything whilst trying to resolve everything.' 'Scotist', with
Erasmus, became a handy epithet for all schoolmen, nay, for everything
superannuated and antiquated. He would rather lose the whole of Scotus
than Cicero's or Plutarch's works. These he feels the better for
reading, whereas he rises from the study of scholasticism frigidly
disposed towards true virtue, but irritated into a disputatious mood.

It would, no doubt, have been difficult for Erasmus to find in the arid
traditionalism which prevailed in the University of Paris the heyday of
scholastic philosophy and theology. From the disputations which he heard
in the Sorbonne he brought back nothing but the habit of scoffing at
doctors of theology, or as he always ironically calls them by their
title of honour: _Magistri nostri_. Yawning, he sat among 'those holy
Scotists' with their wrinkled brows, staring eyes, and puzzled faces,
and on his return home he writes a disrespectful fantasy to his young
friend Thomas Grey, telling him how he sleeps the sleep of Epimenides
with the divines of the Sorbonne. Epimenides awoke after his forty-seven
years of slumber, but the majority of our present theologians will never
wake up. What may Epimenides have dreamt? What but subtleties of the
Scotists: quiddities, formalities, etc.! Epimenides himself was reborn
in Scotus, or rather, Epimenides was Scotus's prototype. For did not he,
too, write theological books, in which he tied such syllogistic knots as
he would never have been able to loosen? The Sorbonne preserves
Epimenides's skin written over with mysterious letters, as an oracle
which men may only see after having borne the title of _Magister noster_
for fifteen years.

It is not a far cry from caricatures like these to the _Sorbonistres_
and the _Barbouillamenta Scoti_ of Rabelais. 'It is said', thus Erasmus
concludes his _boutade_, 'that no one can understand the mysteries of
this science who has had the least intercourse with the Muses or the
Graces. All that you have learned in the way of _bonae literae_ has to
be unlearned first; if you have drunk of Helicon you must first vomit
the draught. I do my utmost to say nothing according to the Latin taste,
and nothing graceful or witty; and I am already making progress, and
there is hope that one day they will acknowledge Erasmus.'

It was not only the dryness of the method and the barrenness of the
system which revolted Erasmus. It was also the qualities of his own