These sea-tales were spread over a year, being delivered in the Easter Terms of 1893 and 1894.  Before they were finished Froude had begun another course on the life and correspondence of Erasmus.  Erasmus is one of the choicest names in the history of letters, the flower of the religious Renaissance.  Simply and sincerely pious, he enjoyed without abusing all the pleasures of life, wrote such Latin prose as had not been known since Pliny, and learnt Greek that he might understand the true meaning of the New Testament.  Hating the monks of his own time for their ignorance and coarseness, he was as learned as any Benedictine of old, and as a master of irony he is like a gentler Pascal, a more reverent Voltaire.  He loved England, the England of Archbishop Warham, Dean Colet, and Sir Thomas More.  English ladies too were much to his taste, and in his familiar letters he has described their charms with frank appreciation.  Priest as he was, and strictly moral, he cultivated an innocent epicureanism, including the collection of manuscripts and the exposure of pretentious ignorance in high places.  He felt imperfect sympathy with Luther, and his literary criticism would have made no reformation.  He was indeed precisely what we now call a Broad Churchman, accepting forms as convenient, though not essential, to faith.  No one was better qualified to interpret him than Froude, whose translations of his letters, though free and sometimes loose, are vivid, racy, and idiomatic.  Froude was by no means a blind admirer of Erasmus.  His favourite heroes were men of action, and he regarded Luther as the real champion of spiritual freedom.

Intellect, he used to say, fought no battles, and was no match for superstition.  Without Luther there would have been no Reformation.  There might well have been a Reformation without Erasmus.

Neither of them was necessary according to Contarini, and in truth the Reformation had many sides.  When Selden attended the Westminster Assembly of Divines, he took occasion to remind his colleagues that the Scriptures were not written in English.  “Perhaps in your little pocket Bibles with gilt leaves” (which they would often pull out and read) “the translation may be thus, but the Greek or the Hebrew signifies thus and thus.”  So he would speak, says Whitelock, and totally silence them.  But neither were the Scriptures written in Latin.  It was Erasmus who revived the study of the Greek Testament, the charter of the scholar’s reformation.  He gave the Renaissance, in its origin purely Pagan, a Christian direction, and prevented the divorce of learning from religion.  He also protested against the confusion of Christianity with asceticism, and against belief in the superior sanctity of monks.  He turned his satire upon corruption in high places, and did not spare the Holy See.  His residence in England, his friendship with More, his admiration for the earlier and better part of Henry viii.’s career, connected him with events of which Froude