The Age of Erasmus: Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and LondonAllen, P. S. (Percy Stafford)
History
The Age of Erasmus: Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London
Allen, P. S. (Percy Stafford)
Erasmus, Desiderius, -1536; Renaissance
Aleander, when he returned from Orleans to Paris in 1511, kept quiet
for a month, in order to awaken public interest. Then he announced a
course of lectures on Ausonius, to begin on 30 July. His device was
entirely successful. Two thousand people gathered, and he was obliged
to lead them over from his own college, de la Marche, to a larger
building, known as the Portico of Cambray. He had composed an
elaborate oration of twenty-four pages. 'It took me two hours and a
half to deliver,' he says, 'and would have taken four, if I hadn't
been a quick reader; but no one showed the least sign of fatigue, in
spite of the heat. My voice lasted very well. Next day I had nearly as
good an audience, although it was the day for the disputation at the
Sorbonne. On the day after, all seats were taken by 11, though I do
not begin till 1.' His success was not mere imagination. One who was
present tells us that men looked upon him as if he had come down from
heaven, and shouted 'Viuat, viuat', as they were accustomed to do to
Faustus Andrelinus, another witty Italian who was then lecturing in
Paris. A lecturer to-day who went on into the third hour would
scarcely be so popular.
But Aleander was not alone in his powers of speech, and others besides
Parisians could listen. Butzbach tells us, not without humour, of a
certain Baldwin Bessel of Haarlem, a learned physician with a
wonderful memory, who was summoned to Laach to heal their Abbot, who
lay sick. On one occasion at Coblenz he harangued an audience of 300
for three hours on end on the power of eloquence, and stimulated by
the sight of such a gathering, worked himself up in his peroration,
until he believed himself to be a second Cicero. His hearers perhaps
did not agree. Anyway, Butzbach is the only person who mentions him,
and he would have preferred a little less eloquence and a little more
medicine; for the Abbot, instead of recovering, died under the hands
of the new Cicero in two days.
Besides lecturing at the university, young men also maintained
themselves by working for the printers, correcting proof-sheets and
composing complimentary prefaces and verses. Another service which
they could render to both printers and authors was to give public
'interpretations', as they were called, of new books on publication,
for the purpose of advertisement. These interpretations probably took
place at the printer's office, and were of the nature of a review,
describing the book's contents; and they were doubtless repeated at
frequent intervals before new groups of likely purchasers.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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