In the summer of 1499 Erasmus was carried off to England by another friend whom he had captivated, the young Lord Mountjoy, who had come abroad to study until the child-bride whom he had already married should be old enough to become his wife.  After a summer spent among bright-eyed English ladies at a country-house in Hertfordshire, then studded with the hunting-boxes of the nobility, and a visit to London which brought him into quick friendship with More, ten or eleven years his junior, Erasmus persuaded his patron to take him for a while to Oxford.  Mountjoy promised but could not perform.  The Earl of Warwick was to be tried in Westminster Hall, and Mountjoy as a peer must be in his place.  So Erasmus rode in to Oxford, over Shotover and across Milham ford, alone.

As an Austin canon he had a claim on St. Mary’s, a college which had been established in 1435 at the instance of a number of Augustinian abbots and priors, for the purpose of bringing young canons to Oxford to profit by the life and studies of the university; in much the same way that Mansfield and Manchester Colleges have joined us in recent years.  For two or three months he was here, enjoying the society of the learned and attending Colet’s lectures on the Epistles of St. Paul; invited to dine in college halls, as a congenial visitor is to-day, and spending the afternoons, not the evenings, in discussions arising out of the conversation over the dinner-table.  His ready wit and natural vivacity, his wide reading and serious purpose, made themselves felt.  Even Colet the austere was delighted with him and begged him to stay.  He was lecturing himself on St. Paul; let Erasmus take some part of the Old Testament and expound it to fascinated audiences.  Oxford laid her spell upon the young Dutch canon—­upon whom does she not?—­but he was not yet ready.  To give his life to sacred studies was the purpose that was riveting itself upon him; but he could not accomplish what he wished without Greek at the least—­he never made any serious attempt to learn Hebrew—­and Greek was not to be had in Oxford, hardly indeed anywhere in Western Europe outside Italy and perhaps Spain.  Indeed, for some years to come this university was to display her characteristic, or may be her admirable, caution towards the new light offered to her from without.

We must bear in mind the well-reasoned hostility of the Church to—­or at least hesitation about—­the revival of learning.  In the period we are considering the powers of evil were very real.  Men instinctively accepted the existence of a kingdom of darkness, extending its borders over the sphere of knowledge as over the other sides of human activity.  Greek was the language of some of the most licentious literature—­Sappho’s poems were burnt by the Church at Constantinople in 1073—­and of many detestable heresies; and thus though the Council of Vienne, with missionary zeal, had recommended in 1311 that lectures in Greek—­as in other languages of the heretical East—­should