Note 174 — Chapter VI · ERASMUS

Ep. 531. Lee’s account of his quarrel with Erasmus is given in his Apologia, which he addressed to the University of Louvain. He states that Erasmus had come to his house at that place, and had asked him to aid in the corrected version of his New Testament which he was then projecting. At first Lee refused, but finally, on being pressed by Erasmus, he consented, and began the work of revision, but Erasmus quickly became angry at so many suggested changes. Reports about the annotations and corrections proposed by Lee began to be spread abroad, and Erasmus hearing of them, suspected some secret design, and came from Basle to try and get a copy of the proposed criticism. Lee wished that it should be considered rather a matter of theology than of letters. Bishop Fisher wrote, on hearing rumours of the quarrel, urging Lee to try and make his peace with Erasmus, and in deference to this, Lee informed Erasmus that he would leave the matter entirely in the hands of the bishop, and had forwarded to him the book of his proposed criticisms. Erasmus, however, did not wait, but published the Dialogus Domini Jacobi Latomi, which all regarded as an attack upon Lee. The latter would have published a reply had he not received letters from England from Fisher, Colet, Pace, and More, begging him to keep his temper. Lee agreed to stop, and only asked Fisher to decide the matter quickly. On returning to Louvain, Lee found that Erasmus had published his Dialogus bilingium et trilingium, in which Lee was plainly indicated as a man hostile to the study of letters in general. This Lee denied altogether, and in brief, he does not, he says, condemn Erasmus’s notes on the New Testament so much as the copy he had taken as the basis for his corrections of the later text. “Politian,” says Lee, at the end of his Apologia, “Politian declares that there are two great pests of literature—ignorance and envy. To these I will add a third—‘adulation’—for I have no belief in any one who, having made a mistake, is not willing to acknowledge it.”

Lee’s criticism of Erasmus’s translation appeared at Louvain in January 1520. It produced an immediate reply from Erasmus, published at Antwerp in May 1520—a reply “all nose, teeth, nails, and stomach.” In this Erasmus says that 1200 copies of the New Testament had been printed by Froben. In the collation he had been much assisted by Bishop Tunstall, who had, in fact, supplied the exemplar on which he had worked. Erasmus then gives what he thinks is the correct version of the differences between Lee and himself. Lee, he says, was only just beginning Greek, and Erasmus, who had been working at the correction of his version of the Testament, showed him what he was doing. The margins of the book were then full of notes, and here and there whole pages of paper were added. Lee said that he had a few notes that might be useful, and Erasmus expressed his pleasure at receiving help and asked for them. Lee thereupon gave him some miscellaneous jottings, and of these, according to Erasmus’s version of the facts, he made use of hardly anything. Soon, however, reports were spread about that out of some three hundred places in which Lee had corrected the first edition of the translation, Erasmus had adopted two hundred. Bishop Fisher tried to make peace, and to prevent two men who both meant well to the cause of religion from quarrelling in public. His intervention was, however, too late, as already the letter of Erasmus to Thomas Lupset had appeared and thus rendered reconciliation impossible.