endship, the enlightened
piety to which Erasmus could address the noble words of his preface to St.
Jerome, confirm the judgement of every good man of Warham's day. The
Archbishop's life was a simple one; and an hour's pleasant reading, a
quiet chat with some learned new-comer, alone broke the endless round of
civil and ecclesiastical business. Few men realized so thoroughly as
Warham the new conception of an intellectual and moral equality before
which the old social distinctions of the world were to vanish away. His
favourite relaxation was to sup among a group of scholarly visitors,
enjoying their fun and retorting with fun of his own. Colet, who had now
become Dean of St. Paul's and whose sermons were stirring all London,
might often be seen with Grocyn and Linacre at the Primate's board. There
too might probably have been seen Thomas More, who, young as he was, was
already famous through his lectures at St. Lawrence on "The City of God."
But the scholar-world found more than supper or fun at the Primate's
board. His purse was ever open to relieve their poverty. "Had I found such
a patron in my youth," Erasmus wrote long after, "I too might have been
counted among the fortunate ones." It was with Grocyn that Erasmus on a
second visit to England rowed up the river to Warham's board at Lambeth,
and in spite of an unpromising beginning the acquaintance turned out
wonderfully well. The Primate loved him, Erasmus wrote home, as if he were
his father or his brother, and his generosity surpassed that of all his
friends. He offered him a sinecure, and when he declined it he bestowed on
him a pension of a hundred crowns a year. When Erasmus wandered to Paris
it was Warham's invitation which recalled him to England. When the rest of
his patrons left him to starve on the sour beer of Cambridge it was Warham
who sent him fifty angels. "I wish there were thirty legions of them," the
Primate puns in his good-humoured way.

[Sidenote: Henry the Eighth]

Real however as this progress was, the group of scholars who represented
the New Learning in England still remained a little one through the reign
of Henry the Seventh. But the king's death in 1509 wholly changed their
position. A "New Order," to use their own enthusiastic phrase, dawned on
them in the accession of his son. Henry the Eighth had hardly completed
his eighteenth year when he mounted the throne; but his manly beauty, his
bodily vigour, and skill in arms, seemed match