was well received by Julius II.

On the accession of Henry VIII. he returned to England and lectured
for some time at Cambridge. Later on he removed to Basle and settled
down to the work of preparing editions of the New Testament and of the
Fathers. The triumph of the Reformation party in Basle drove him for a
time to seek a refuge in Freiburg, but he returned to die at Basle in
1536.

In his wanderings Erasmus was brought into contact with the leading
scholars of France, England, Germany, and Italy, and was thoroughly
acquainted with the lights and shadows of the Renaissance movement. In
his knowledge of Greek he was surpassed by few of his contemporaries,
and in the purity and ease of his Latin style he stood without a
serious rival. Like many others of the Humanist school he delighted in
attacking the ignorance of the monks and Scholastics, and in
denouncing the abuses of the age, though, as was the case with most of
the literary reformers of the time, his own life as an ecclesiastic
was far from exemplary.

Yet Erasmus himself was never an enemy of Christianity, nor did he
desire the overthrow of ecclesiastical authority. He did, indeed,
advocate reform, and in his advocacy of reform he may have been
carried too far at times, but in his heart Erasmus had little sympathy
with doctrinal changes. Ignorance he believed to be at the root of the
decline of religion, and hence he would have welcomed a complete
change in the educational system of the Church. Instead of
Scholasticism he advocated study of the Scriptures and of the early
Fathers, and in order to prepare the way for such a policy he devoted
himself at Basle to the task of preparing an edition of the New