pelled to look elsewhere, not only for promotion but for bread, he returned to the Imperial presence, and put his soul once more in the livery of the Court. Maximilian soon found him employ. He was despatched to England on a secret mission to Henry VIII. -then young and gay, fond of mumming and masquerading, fond of incognito visits to the City, but afterwards fonder of marrying wives and of treating them in a style which would have furnished Cornelius with many a biting illustration of masculine wickedness. Here Agrippa held congenial intercourse with Dean Colet, the friend of Erasmus, the bold scholar who dared to promote the study of Greek, the intrepid preacher who ventured to divide the bread of life at St. Paul's instead of cheating his hearers with the chaff of the schools. But his stay in England was short. His mission discharged, he returned to Germany and was sent by the Emperor to the Italian wars-those in which the military pontiff, Julius II., was figuring with so much apostolic propriety. For several years Cornelius pursued the trade of a soldier, varying his duties by intervals of study and by the delivery of lectures at Pisa and Pavia. In the course of his campaigning, he was once taken prisoner by the Swiss: on another occasion, he received the dignity of knighthood on the field as a member of the Council of Pisa he had the honour of being excommunicated by the Pope; and at the battle of Marignano, into which he went with part of a manuscript Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans and other literary ware on his person, the loose sheets were seen flying from his pocket in the heat of the engagement, and, but for the ardour of a young friend who rushed forward to seize them, would have been trampled into a bloody pulp on that hard-fought plain.

The issue of the wars was adverse to the hopes of Agrippa. Francis I. took possession of the Duchy of Milan, and severed his connexion with the University of Pavia. Deprived also of his pay as a soldier, he could make neither profession available for his support. Then follows another dismal interval of suspense. For two or three years he looks anxiously around him for a place where to pitch his tent and rest his weary foot. Friends interest themselves on his behalf, and princes accord him a passing smile, but his purse is wellnigh empty, and his heart grows sick with hope deferred. Doors of promise, indeed, appear to open, but before he can dart in, they are cruelly closed. At one time there is a fine prospect for him at Vercelli, where a great ecclesiastical dignitary will give him 200 ducats a-year and a house of his own selection. But the great dignitary cools in his bounty, and leaves the poor scholar to pick up ducats where he can. At another, he enters the service of Charles the Gentle of Savoy, perhaps in the capa

Battles with the Monks at Metz.

77

city of a physician; but there, says one of his friends, 'You will be offered little pay, and you will get it at the day of judgment." Then doors of good augury are heard creaking at Grenoble, at Avignon, at Geneva, but all to no purpose, until at last he receives the appointment of advocate and orator to the free town of Metz (1518). Thither he proceeds, and there he trusts to settle. For a while all goes well. He makes official speeches, writes a tractate on original sin, gives medical assistance when the plague is astir, and prescribes' Pestilence pills' and 'Adam's Earth' for its relief. But unfortunately he is soon entangled in a theological controversy; and in such a monkery as Metz, a place which, small as it was, actually kept an Inquisition of its own, this was a fearful event for one whose orthodoxy was more than suspected. The text of the contention is richly illustrative of the frivolous motives which have frequently been adopted for a grand ecclesiastical row. There was a legend afloat to the effect that St. Anne, the mother of the Virgin Mary, married three husbands in succession, and that by each of them she had a daughter, whose name was Mary. The celebrated Faber d'Etaples, otherwise Father Stapulensis, the friend of Luther, having no worthier employment for his pen at the moment, wrote a treatise in refutation of this tradition. Cornelius read the work, he too having a listless hour on his hands, as we must presume. Whilst discoursing on the subject with a certain Deacon of Metz, Roscius by name-the latter being equally in want of fitting occupation at the time-Agrippa expressed his full concurrence in Faber's conclusions. The monks, idler than all, immediately took fire. They denounced the town orator as a slanderer of the blessed Anne. They affirmed that Faber's book ought to be burnt. They would doubtless have had much pleasure in adding its author to the proposed literary auto-da-fè. Cornelius defended his opinions in a series of propositions which Salini, the prior of the Dominicans, attempted to refute, but got dreadfully mauled in a rejoinder wherein the town-orator spake out right fiercely, styling his antagonist a dog, and telling the friars a bit of his mind respecting their extortionate proceedings in the matter of indulgences and other priestly impostures.

Another event soon occurred to aggravate the fury of the monks. A young woman in the neighbourhood was seized, on suspicion of being a witch, and brought before the Civil Court for trial. Savin, the Inquisitor, interfered in the proceedings with a view to ensure, and, if possible, to accelerate her condemnation. Agrippa came forward as her advocate, and, incensed at the sanguinary spirit of the man, opened fire oratorically upon the Torquemada of Metz. Nor was he choice in his language, if we may judge from the epithets employed in his

letters. He calls him a rascally Inquisitor-a great fat swollen brother- a bloate dbrute- a bloodthirsty man'-' a blaspheming brotherkin: in fact, discoursed of him in such vigorous terms that, if his public denunciations corresponded in any degree with his epistolary vituperation, the followers of St. Dominic could never be expected to forgive their assailant. The result was such as he might have anticipated. The temperature of Metz, socially considered, became too high for his comfort or even for his endurance. He resigned his office, and set out anew to search for a home and an income.

It is needless to relate how this ill-starred adventurer travelled from place to place, buoyed up by promises of employment, but eating the salt bread and climbing the steep stairs which are appointed to those whose fortunes are dependent upon the favour of princes. With a wife, who died, however, in 1521, but was succeeded by another in the following year, and a family still increasing, Cornelius was brought into close colloquy with suffering, and was not without fears that he might perish in the struggle for food. From Metz he proceeded to Cologne, where he tarried many weary months, expecting help from the Duke of Savoy; from Cologne he journeyed to Geneva, where he practised medicine for support; from Geneva he was lured by a willo'-the-wisp to Friburg, of which town he was elected physician and counsellor; but scarcely had he settled himself there when a still more flaming ignis fatuus attracted him from Switzerland to France. He was offered the post of physician to the Queenmother, Louisa of Savoy, a woman full of hatred for heretics and full of affection for gold. To Lyons, therefore, he went, and entered upon his duties, but month after month flew by without the slightest intimation on the part of the princess that her servants were not expected to subsist on air. Cornelius then threw

out a few modest hints on the topic: next, direct application was made to the treasury; afterwards pressing entreaties were urged; but though rich in promises,' if promises could constitute wealth, he found it impossible to get one of them cashed. It is pitiable to read his wailing epistles whilst compelled to sue like a mendicant for his official pay. Smarting with vexation after the failure of a desperate attempt to nail a shuffling and evasive treasurer, he says: 'You see how we are played with! Think of me, 'fought against on every side by sorrows-by griefs, indeed, greater and more incessant than I care to write. There is no 'friend here to help me: all comfort me with empty words: ' and the Court title, which should have brought me honour and profit, aggravates my hurt, by adding against me envy and contempt. Again he writes: Through the royal promises I

His Work on the Vanity of the Sciences.

79

am turned, like Ixion on a wheel, haunted by all the furies. 'I am almost losing human senses, and become good for nothing.' Add to this, that he incurs the displeasure of his patroness, though for what reason he is unable to explain, until he bethinks him that he has not played the courtier with sufficient dexterity; for had he not, when consulted respecting the nativity of the Chevalier Bourbon, then in arms against France, predicted his success, without considering that the business of a loyal astrologer is always to interpret the stars favourably for his sovereign? Because, like Balaam, he could not curse when desired, the Queen directed his name to be erased from the pension-list, without even apprising him that her royal sunshine-was it not rather pure moonshine ?-was about to be withdrawn. In fact, poor Agrippa was discharged like a dog. Had I been a servant to a merchant or a draper, or even to some peasant,' he exclaims, man or woman of the meanest class, no such master ' or mistress would have turned me off without warning, even if 'I had been guilty of offence. . . . It is an act of authority 'which would be called in any private person an act of perfidy 'and betrayal.' Verily, if Cornelius had known how to read men's fortunes in the heavens, or could have manufactured philosophical gold, he would surely have foreseen his own melancholy fate at Lyons, and would have tried to extract ingots from paving-stones rather than procure pay from the flint-hearted Louisa of Savoy.

In the midst of all these vexations, however, he had applied himself to the composition of a treatise, De Incertitudine et Vanitate Scientiarum et Artium atque Excellentia Verbi Dei. The book is certainly something of a literary puzzle. Here was a man who had drunk more deeply at the wells of knowledge than most of his contemporaries-who was accounted such a living repertory of wisdom, that Paulus Jovius calls him portentosum ingenium, and Ludwig, literarum literatorumque omnium miraculum -who had spent his early years in investigating the most recondite questions, and his riper ones in completing the Grand Tour of Philosophy-and yet this man, at the age of forty, deliberately seizes his pen to tell the world that all learning is vanity, and that the greatest happiness is to know-nothing! Nihil scire felicissima vita. Unquestionably the book must be read, for the most part, as a satire. He himself styles it a cynical declamation, and declares that he writes as a dog. The treatise might indeed have been suggested, if not dictated, by the Stygian pug he was fabled to have kept as his counsellor. It is a fierce snarl at all secular learning. The writer appears to have been indulging in potations deep' of scepticism, and then roused to

frenzy, he rushes out into the fields of philosophy, ravaging, says an able writer in a recent work, 'with a wild Berserker fury the whole domain of knowledge.'* Like Sextus Empiricus, though in a different vein, he seems as if he would invalidate the authority of all human wisdom, and reduce the mind to a mere mirror on which passing images might be represented, but where nothing could be certainly and lastingly impressed.

The trick of the work is, however, somewhat too barefaced. His object is to show that there have been conflicting opinions in every science, and conflicting practices in every art; and from this unquestionable fact you are expected to infer that nothing human is worthy of trust. You talk of grammar, for instance,are you prepared to decide whether there are fifteen pronouns as Priscian asserted, or more, as Diomedes and Phocas maintained? Are gerunds nouns or verbs? Is H a letter, or not? Should questio be written with a diphthong or a simple vowel? Perhaps you are a student of history? Very well; but seeing that the same event is variously related by different writers, must you not set some of them down as liars of the first magnitude? And if satisfied of an author's veracity, how can you be sure that he is not perpetually blundering; for did not Ephorus relate that there was but one city in all Ireland, and did not Stephen the Grecian assert that Vienna was a town of Galilee ? Nor is arithmetic a fixed and settled science. It is not decided whether an odd or an even number is to be preferred; whether any number, in fact, can be said to be properly even; or which is the most perfect number between three, six, and ten.

In like savage fashion does Agrippa run down the various species of accomplishments. Dancing is an abominable art. Were it not set off with music, it would appear the greatest vanity of vanities. It conduces to wantonness, and is the fitting accompaniment to lascivious feasts. It is the friend of idolatry; for when the children of Israel had sacrificed to their golden calf, they rose up to sing and dance. Statuary and painting, too, have been turned to heathenish uses, and have proved efficient auxiliaries to superstition. Architecture, indeed, is not a bad thing in its way, but does not ostentation dictate the construction of most of our edifices? What built the Pyramids, the Labyrinth, the Sphynx, the Tower of Babel? What suggested the mad project for chiselling Mount Athos into an image of Alexander holding a city of ten thousand persons in his right hand? What but pure unmitigated vanity? As for music, is it not an art professed by men of ill-regulated dispositions only? Does it not

* Hours with the Mystics. By R. A. Vaughan, B.A., vol. ii. 38.