It is to John Fisher, most illustrious of her Chancellors, that Cambridge owes the introduction of the New Learning which transformed the whole academic system and inspired it with fresh vigour. In his early years at the University Italian scholarship was beginning to arouse the interest of the learned; and the name of his friend Erasmus is forever associated with the Humanist movement and the study of Greek which was then beginning to revolutionise the academic world.

Perhaps few men have ever been more persistently misrepresented, both by contemporaries and by posterity, than the most famous scholar of the Renaissance, Erasmus of Rotterdam. The testimony of his own works was, and is, often either ignored or totally misread; and a number of his later biographers show a distressing lack of any sense of humour—without which he must indeed remain an enigma to the most learned mind—that alone makes them incapable of understanding the witty genius who complained so bitterly when his contemporaries took him too seriously. Some even hail him as one of the leaders of the Reformation, ranging him with Luther and his companions, against whose works the great scholar fought with all the might of his pen. Even the ‘uncoguid’ among those of his own faith have distrusted Erasmus. Surely the best answer to all criticisms— granting all his faults—is the eloquent fact that the two men who knew him best in England, and who stood by him to the end, were Thomas More and John Fisher. If it be true that we may judge a man by his friends, the judgment should stand Erasmus in good stead.