DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.63221#0062
36
THE FRENCH RENAISSANCE
bed of suffering, said that his one consolation in his misery
had been the style of a letter that a friend wrote to him
in Latin. His contemporary, Cardinal Bembo, went farther
still, and in spite of his red hat, implored young men not
to read St. Paul for fear it should injure their style.
Enthusiasm was not the only quality which set this genera-
tion apart in the annals of scholarship. The Scholars of the
sixteenth century throughout Europe were a race—a nation
—with their own language, their own unwritten laws. They
corresponded with each other all over the world, though
comparatively few of them ever met in person. They shared
in spirit each other's labours, imparting every fresh result of
research. Such energy involved endless penmanship. Erasmus
generally wrote twenty, and received forty letters a day.
Sometimes the desire to see a great Scholar (the commen-
tator of some obscure Latin passage—the interpreter of
some subtle inflexion of gender) would inflame the breast of
his correspondent, and he crossed the seas to visit him.
The houses of Bude in Paris, and of Julius Caesar Scaliger
in Verona, were always full of such guests. It was thus that
Erasmus went to see Sir Thomas More, drawn to him also
by the magnetism of kindred ideas; thus that a Paduan
writer describes—only, sad to say, in imagination—the visit
of More to Villovanus, and their long midsummer days of
dialectic in the meadows round Padua.
Great movements, whether or not the result of law, always
seem like miracle. If the moment is ripe, the right men and
the right events spring up at its call. When time and
chance meet there is an electric shock, and design and ac-
cident play into one another’s hands. It is as if Fate had
THE FRENCH RENAISSANCE
bed of suffering, said that his one consolation in his misery
had been the style of a letter that a friend wrote to him
in Latin. His contemporary, Cardinal Bembo, went farther
still, and in spite of his red hat, implored young men not
to read St. Paul for fear it should injure their style.
Enthusiasm was not the only quality which set this genera-
tion apart in the annals of scholarship. The Scholars of the
sixteenth century throughout Europe were a race—a nation
—with their own language, their own unwritten laws. They
corresponded with each other all over the world, though
comparatively few of them ever met in person. They shared
in spirit each other's labours, imparting every fresh result of
research. Such energy involved endless penmanship. Erasmus
generally wrote twenty, and received forty letters a day.
Sometimes the desire to see a great Scholar (the commen-
tator of some obscure Latin passage—the interpreter of
some subtle inflexion of gender) would inflame the breast of
his correspondent, and he crossed the seas to visit him.
The houses of Bude in Paris, and of Julius Caesar Scaliger
in Verona, were always full of such guests. It was thus that
Erasmus went to see Sir Thomas More, drawn to him also
by the magnetism of kindred ideas; thus that a Paduan
writer describes—only, sad to say, in imagination—the visit
of More to Villovanus, and their long midsummer days of
dialectic in the meadows round Padua.
Great movements, whether or not the result of law, always
seem like miracle. If the moment is ripe, the right men and
the right events spring up at its call. When time and
chance meet there is an electric shock, and design and ac-
cident play into one another’s hands. It is as if Fate had