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DISSERTATION.—PART FIRST.
Vives,[1] Sir Thomas More,[2] and many other accomplished scholars of a similar character, who, if they do not rank in the same line with the daring reformers by whom the errors of the Catholic Church were openly assailed, certainly exhibit a very striking contrast to the barbarous and unenlightened writers of the preceding age.
The Protestant Reformation, which followed immediately after, was itself one of the natural consequences of the revival of letters, and of the invention of printing. But although, in one point of view, only an effect, it is not, on the present occasion, less entitled to notice than the causes by which it was produced.
The renunciation, in a great part of Europe, of theological
- ↑ Ludovicus Vives was a learned Spaniard, intimately connected both with Erasmus and More; with the former of whom he lived for some time at Lonvain; "where they both promoted literature as much as they could, though not without great opposition from some of the divines."—Jortin, p. 255.
"He was invited into England by Wolsey in 1523: and coming to Oxford, he read the Cardinal's lecture on Humanity, and also lectures of Civil Law, which Henry VIII. and his Queen, Catherine, did him the honour of attending."—(Ibid. p. 207.) He died at Bruges in 1554.
In point of good sense and acuteness, wherever he treats of philosophical questions, he yields to none of his contemporaries; and in some of his anticipations of the future progress of science, he discovers a mind more comprehensive and sagacious than any of them. Erasmus appears, from a letter of his to Budæus, (dated in 1521,) to have foreseen the the brilliant career which Vives, than a very young man, was about to run. "Vives in stadio literario, non minus feliciter quam gnaviter decertat, et si satis ingenium hominis novi, non conquiescet, donec omnes a tergo reliquerit."—For this letter, (the whole of which is peculiarly interesting, as it contains a character of Sir Thomas More, and an account of the extraordinary accomplishments of his daughters,) see Jortin's Life of Erasmus, vol. ii. p. 366, et seq. - ↑ See Note A.
