The Age of Erasmus by P. S. Allen


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Page 4

During this period Agricola translated Isocrates _ad Demonicum_ and
the _Axiochus de contemnenda morte_, a dialogue wrongly attributed to
Plato, which was a favourite in Renaissance days. Also he completed
the chief composition of his lifetime, the _De inuentione dialectica_,
a considerable treatise on rhetoric. His favourite books, Geldenhauer
tells us, were Pliny's Natural History, the younger Pliny's Letters,
Quintilian's _Institutio Oratoria_, and selections from Cicero and
Plato. These were his travelling library, carried with him wherever he
went; two of them, Pliny's Letters and Quintilian, he had copied out
with his own hand. Other books, as he acquired them, he planted out in
friends' houses as pledges of return.

In 1479 he left Italy and went home. On his way he stayed for some
months with the Bishop of Augsburg at Dillingen, on the Danube, and
there translated Lucian's _De non facile credendis delationibus_. A
manuscript of Homer sorely tempted him to stay on through the winter.
He felt that without Homer his knowledge of Greek was incomplete; and
he proposed to copy it out from beginning to end, or at any rate the
Iliad. But home called him, and he went on. At Spires, in quest of
manuscripts, he went with a friend to the cathedral library. He
describes it as not bad for Germany, though it contained nothing in
Greek, and only a few Latin manuscripts of any interest--a Livy and a
Pliny, very old, but much injured and the texts corrupt--and nothing
at all that could be called eloquence, that is to say, pure
literature.

When he had been a little while in Groningen, the town council
bethought them to turn his talents and learning to some account. He
was a fine figure of a man, who would make a creditable show in
conducting their business; and for composing the elegant Latin
epistles, which every respectable corporation felt bound to rise to on
occasions, no one was better equipped than he. He was retained as town
secretary, and in the four years of his service went on frequent
embassies. During the first year we hear of him visiting his father at
Siloe, and contracting a friendship with one of the nuns[1]; to whom
he afterwards sent a work of Eucherius, bishop of Lyons, which he had
found in a manuscript at Roermond. Twice he visited Brussels on
embassy to Maximilian; and in the next year he followed the Archduke's
court for several months, visiting Antwerp, and making the
acquaintance of Barbiriau, the famous musician. Maximilian offered him
the post of tutor to his children and Latin secretary to himself; the
town of Antwerp invited him to become head of their school. He might
easily have accepted. He was not altogether happy at Groningen. His
countrymen had done him honour, but they had no real appreciation for
learning, and some of them were boorish and cross-grained. It was the
old story of Pegasus in harness; the practical men of business and the
scholar impatient of restraint. His parents, too, were now both
dead--in 1480, within a few months of each other--and such homes as he
had had, with his father amongst the nuns at Siloe and with his mother
in the house of her husband the tranter, were therefore closed to him.
And yet neither invitation attracted him. Friesland was his native
land; and for all his wanderings the love of it was in his blood.
Adwert, too, was near, and Wessel. He refused, and stayed on in his
irksome service.

[1] In view of Geldenhauer's testimony to Agricola's high
character in this respect, we need not question, as does
Goswin of Halen, the nature of this intimacy.

But in 1482 came an offer he could not resist. An old friend of Pavia
days, John of Dalberg, for whom he had written the oration customary
on his installation as Rector in 1474, had just been appointed Bishop
of Worms. He invited Agricola for a visit, and urged him to come and
join him; living partly as a friend in the Bishop's household, partly
lecturing at the neighbouring University of Heidelberg. The opening
was just such as Agricola wished, and he eagerly accepted; but
circumstances at Groningen prevented him from redeeming his promise
until the spring of 1484. For little more than a year he rejoiced in
the new position, which gave full scope for his abilities. Then he set
out to Rome with Dalberg, their business being to deliver the usual
oration of congratulation to Innocent VIII on his election. On the way
back he fell ill of a fever at Trent, and the Bishop had to leave him
behind. He recovered enough to struggle back to Heidelberg, but only
to die in Dalberg's arms on 27 Oct. 1485, at the age of 41.

Few men of letters have made more impression on their contemporaries;
and yet his published writings are scanty. The generation that
followed sought for his manuscripts as though they were of the
classics; but thirty years elapsed before the _De inuentione
dialectica_ was printed, and more than fifty before there was a
collected edition. Besides his letters the only thing which has
permanent value is a short educational treatise, _De formando studio_,
which he wrote in 1484, and addressed to Barbiriau--some compensation
to the men of Antwerp for his refusal to come to them. His work was to
learn and to teach rather than to write. To learn Greek when few
others were learning it, and when the apparatus of grammar and
dictionary had to be made by the student for himself, was a task to
consume even abundant energies; and still more so, if Hebrew, too, was
to be acquired. But though he left little, the fire of his enthusiasm
did not perish with him; passing on by tradition, it kindled in others
whom he had not known, the flame of interest in the wisdom of the
ancients.

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