Word: erasmus
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...Actor Fredric March read excerpts from the works of three dead Nobel laureates. First came the heavily sarcastic foreword to Sinclair Lewis' Main Street: "Main Street is the climax of civilization. That this Ford car might stand in front of the Bon Ton Store, Hannibal invaded Rome and Erasmus wrote in Oxford cloisters...
...twin peaks of English education, Americans are more aware of Oxford, perhaps because Rhodes scholars go there. Few even realize that the reputable university in Cambridge, Mass., was founded by a B.A. (Cantab.) named John Harvard; few could guess that Cambridge is the alma mater of Bacon, Byron, Darwin, Erasmus, Milton, Newton, Spenser, Tennyson, Thackeray, Walpole and Wordsworth. Strong in classics and "PPE" (philosophy, politics, economics), Oxford has dominated Whitehall and Westminster. But now England has a surfeit of politicians and debaters. It needs more scientists and engineers, and so it needs Cambridge...
Clearly, a further and more general revision was needed. And, since the Church itself was as yet unwilling to undertake the enterprise, many individual churchmen in the tradition of Erasmus did as best they could by themselves. In 1902, R. F. Weymouth brought out his The New Testament in Modern Speech; and in 1913 came James Moffatt's The New Testament: a New Translation. More recently Msgr. Ronald Knox--in 1945--and Dr. J. B. Phillips--in 1947--have published servicable and entirely adequate individual translations...
Bitterness & Flattery. In 1511 Holbein the Elder did a memorable drawing of the somber-looking junior Hans, aged 14. A few years later young Hans and his brother Ambrosius were seeking their fortunes as artists in Basel, which, largely because of the presence of the great Dutch scholar Erasmus, was soon to call itself "the city of humanists." Once the young Hans so flattered Erasmus with a portrait sketch that the aging celibate declared if he really looked that good, he would go right out and marry. Ambrosius is believed to have died around the age of 25, leaving Hans...
Basel could not hold him forever: the bitterness that swept over the city at the time of the Reformation so stifled intellectual life that Erasmus complained to a friend in England, "The arts are freezing in this city." Armed with letters of introduction from the old scholar, Hans finally settled in England, where he painted everyone from Sir Thomas More to King Henry VIII himself. He made a couple of visits home, but each time returned to his fatter commissions in England, and there in 1543 he died of the plague...