"When Colet speaks I might be listening to Plato," says Erasmus in
another place, at a time when he was still younger and had just come
from what had been a gay and perhaps in some measure a dissolute life in
Paris: not that it is possible to imagine Erasmus as at any time
committing great excesses, or deeply sinning against the sense of
proportion and measure.

Success is the only criterion, as in art, so in religion: the man that
plucks out his eye and casts it from him, and remains the dull, greedy,
distressful soul he was before, is a damned fool; but the man who does
the same and becomes such that his younger friends report of him, "I
never knew a sunnier nature," is an artist in life, a great artist in
the sense that Christ is supposed to have been a great master; one who
draws men to him, as bees are drawn to flowers. Colet drew the young
Henry the Eighth as well as Erasmus. "The King said: 'Let every man
choose his own doctor. Dean Colet shall be mine!'" Though no doubt
charlatans have often fascinated young scholars and monarchs, yet it is
peculiarly impossible to think of Colet as a charlatan.


VIII

Next let us take a sonnet and a sentence from Michael Angelo:

Yes! hope may with my strong desire keep pace,
And I be undeluded, unbetrayed;
For if of our affections none finds grace
In sight of heaven, then, wherefore hath God made
The world which we inhabit? Better plea
Love cannot have than that in loving thee