llness and
weariness. Then the world displeases him and he despises his own
ambition; he desires to live in holy quiet, musing on Scripture and
shedding tears over his old errors. But these are utterances inspired by
the occasion, which one should not take too seriously.

It was Colet's word and example which first changed Erasmus's desultory
occupation with theological studies into a firm and lasting resolve to
make their pursuit the object of his life. Colet urged him to expound
the Pentateuch or the prophet Isaiah at Oxford, just as he himself
treated of Paul's epistles. Erasmus declined; he could not do it. This
bespoke insight and self-knowledge, by which he surpassed Colet. The
latter's intuitive Scripture interpretation without knowledge of the
original language failed to satisfy Erasmus. 'You are acting
imprudently, my dear Colet, in trying to obtain water from a
pumice-stone (in the words of Plautus). How shall I be so impudent as to
teach that which I have not learned myself? How shall I warm others
while shivering and trembling with cold?... You complain that you find
yourself deceived in your expectations regarding me. But I have never
promised you such a thing; you have deceived yourself by refusing to
believe me when I was telling you the truth regarding myself. Neither
did I come here to teach poetics or rhetoric (Colet had hinted at that);
these have ceased to be sweet to me, since they ceased to be necessary
to me. I decline the one task because it does not come up to my aim in
life; the other because it is beyond my strength ... But when, one day,
I shall be conscious that the necessary power is in me, I, too, shall
choose your part and devote to the assertion of divinity, if no
excellent, yet sincere labour.'

The inference which Erasmus drew first of all was that he should know
Greek better than he had thus far been able to learn it.

Meanwhile his stay in England was rapidly drawing to a close; he had to
return to Paris. Towards the end of his sojourn he wrote to his former
pupil, Robert Fisher, who was in Italy, in a high-pitched tone about the
satisfaction which he experienced in England. A most pleasant and
wholesome climate (he was most sensitive to it); so much humanity and
erudition--not of the worn-out and trivial sort, but of the recondite,
genuine, ancient, Latin and Greek stamp--that he need hardly any more
long to go to Italy. In Colet he thought he heard Plato himself. Grocyn,
the Gre