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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.
But his combination of vast learning with keen observation, of acuteness of remark with a lively fancy, of genial wit with a perfect good sense his union of as sincere a piety and as profound a zeal for rational religion as Colet's with a dispassionate fairness towards older faiths, a large love of secular culture, and a genial freedom and play of mind this union was his own, and it was through this that Erasmus embodied for the Teutonic peoples the quickening influence of the New Learning during the long scholar-life which began at Paris and ended amidst sorrow and darkness at Basle.
If he were not to obtain admission in any capacity to Saint Paul's School, he felt more drawn to Tibble's friend the printer; for the self-seeking luxurious habits into which so many of the beneficed clergy had fallen were repulsive to him, and his whole soul thirsted after that new revelation, as it were, which Colet's sermon had made to him.
Paul's, and provided a copyist to write out the fruits of his labours, a one-eyed Brabantine, Peter Meghen by name, who acted also as Colet's private letter-carrier. Meghen wrote a bold, well-marked hand, which is easily recognizable, and in consequence his work has been traced in many libraries.
The Petition of the Commons sounded like an echo of Colet's famous address to the Convocation. It attributed the growth of heresy not more to "frantic and seditious books published in the English tongue contrary to the very true Catholic and Christian faith" than to "the extreme and uncharitable behaviour of divers ordinaries."
At the time of Colet's return from Italy Erasmus was young and comparatively unknown, but the chivalrous enthusiasm of the new movement breaks out in his letters from Paris, whither he had wandered as a scholar. "I have given up my whole soul to Greek learning," he writes, "and as soon as I get any money I shall buy Greek books and then I shall buy some clothes."
The scholars at Dean Colet's school were, however, interdicted from this amusement, he considering it as tending only to idle jabbering. His great wish was that they all should learn pure and chaste Latin, and he prohibited them from studying the later writers, after Sallust and Cicero.
This was prior to 1519, the date of Colet's decease. There were of course periods of scarcity and high prices then as now. "Befe and motton is so dere, that a peny worth of meet wyll scant suffyse a boy at a meale." The term "cook's-shop" occurs in the Orders and Ordinances devised by the Steward, Dean, and Burgesses of Westminster in 1585, for the better municipal government of that borough.
As the blaze of its jewels, its costly sculptures, its elaborate metal-work burst on Colet's view, he suggested with bitter irony that a saint so lavish to the poor in his lifetime would certainly prefer that they should possess the wealth heaped round him since his death.
But during Henry's reign Colet's figure is almost the only one apart from such representatives of erudition and scholarship as Grocyn and Linacre which stands forth holding out a promise of intellectual and moral progress. In effect there was no literature; in this respect Scotland was in advance of England with the verse of William Dunbar. More's Utopia was still unwritten.
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