12 ERASMUS January only necessary to say that the wine was sweetened with liquorice. His stay at Cambridge, where he was Lady Margaret Reader, lasted from 1511 to 1514; the university was but a poor patron, and part of the time the plague, which he mentions so often and with such fear in his letters to his friend Gunnell,^ was rife and the undegraduates, few in number to begin with, were frightened away. He had been promised thirty nobles as stipend, and to raise this sum public help had to be asked for ; an appeal was made by the university to the liberality of Mountjoy.^ In his last six months at Cambridge Erasmus spent sixty nobles, and received from his hearers only one. But at Cambridge, where Bishop Fisher and the foundation of the Lady Margaret had already done something for sound theology and for training in pastoral work, Erasmus was in an atmosphere suited to himself, and letters such as those of Henry Bullock ^ of Queens', where Erasmus stayed, proved that his sojourn was to be fruitful for the futiu^. It is very probable that Tindale was attracted to Cambridge by the teaching of the great scholar, and the biblical tendency which was so strong in the English Reformation was, in all likelihood, due to Erasmus and his work. His Paraphrases were'afterwards ordered to be placed in English churches ; and we may remember the Bible study of the little group at the White Horse,* some of whom became famous in later days and some of whom passed to Wolsey's foundation at Oxford. In July 1514 Cambridge and London were left for Basle, to which he travelled by way of Flanders, reaching the home of the Amorbachs and Froben in August, and it is now that the central part of his life begins. At Basle he made many friends, not only the great printers but their readers (as we should call them now), and above all Beatus Rhenanus. His appointment as coimsellor to Prince Charles (afterwards emperor) and the invitation to take up his abode in the Netherlands was an honour due to his renown. In March 1515 he returned to England, but in June of that year he paid another visit to Basle. In 1516 his New Testament with Latin translation and notes appeared, about which a pretty quarrel raised by Stunica in Spain and by Edward Lee (afterwards archbishop of York) in England raged for some time. The work was the application of sound learning and the critical method to theology. His critical work would not ' Allen, i, 550, 561 ; Nichols, ii 117, 132. » The letter (probably of the date 1512) is printed in Nichols, vol. ii, app. A, p. 013, and in Allen, L 613. » See Allen, vol. iii, Ep. 826. See also Mullingcr, History oj the University oj Cambridge. Bullock afterwards presided at the Cambridge burning of Luther's works in 1521 (Mullinger, i. 571).
- Cambridge History of English Literature, iii. 37. Milman {Latin Christianity,
ix. 346) has a brief but good stat«ment of the importance of the Paraphrases.
