Most ludicrous of all, because Cicero was a statesman, the modern Ciceronian, writing to his friends from the profound seclusion of his study, deemed it a stylistic duty to imply that he lived in a vortex of politics. The gist of what Erasmus says is merely that other ancients besides Cicero wrote good Latin, and that a true Ciceronianism would adjust itself to its surroundings. No one, it should be added, had a more intelligent admiration for Cicero than Erasmus himself.
We see, then, the peculiar place which he holds in the history of the new learning. It may be allowed that, if the study of classical antiquity be viewed as a progressive science, he did much less to advance it than was done by some other great scholars of a later period. He did not enlarge the boundaries of knowledge in that field as they were afterwards enlarged by the special labours of Joseph Scaliger, of Isaac Casaubon, or of Richard Bentley. But the work which Erasmus did was one which, at that time, was of the first necessity for the northern nations. In his genial, popular way he made them feel the value and charm of the classics as literature; he himself was, in fact, a learned man of letters rather than a critical specialist. Let us remember what the state of northern Europe, as regards literature, was in his boyhood. It was sunk,—to use his own words,—in utter barbarism. To know Greek was the next thing to heresy. "I did my best," he says, "to deliver the rising generation from this slough of ignorance, and to inspire them with a
