Of the Renascence, that "new birth" of the world--for I cling to a word so eminently expressive of a truth that historians of our day seem inclined to forget or to deny--of that regeneration of mankind through the sudden upgrowth of intellectual liberty, Lambeth was in England the shrine. With the Reformation which followed it Lambeth, as we shall see, had little to do. But the home of Warham was the home of the revival of letters. With a singular fitness, the venerable library which still preserves their tradition, ousted from its older dwelling-place by the demolition of the cloister, has in modern days found refuge in the Great Hall, the successor and copy of that hall where the men of the New Learning, where Colet and More and Grocyn and Linacre gathered round the table of Warham.
It was with Grocyn that Erasmus rowed up the river to the Primate's board. Warham addressed a few kindly words to the poor scholar before and after dinner, and then drawing him aside into a corner of the hall (his usual way when he made a present to any one) slipped into his hand an acknowledgment for the book and dedication he had brought with him. "How much did the Archbishop give you?" asked his companion as they rowed home again. "An immense amount!" replied Erasmus, but his friend saw the discontent on his face, and drew from him how small the sum really was. Then the disappointed scholar burst into a string of indignant questions: was Warham miserly, or was he poor, or did he really think such a present expressed the value of the book? Grocyn frankly blurted out the true reason for Warham's economy in his shrewd suspicion that this was not the first dedication that had been prefixed to the 'Hecuba,' and it is likely enough that the Primate's suspicion was right. At any rate, Erasmus owns that Grocyn's sardonic comment, "It is the way with you scholars," stuck in his mind even when he returned to Paris, and made him forward to the Archbishop a perfectly new translation of the 'Iphigenia.'
Few men seem to have realized more thoroughly than Warham the new conception of an intellectual and moral equality before which the old social distinctions were to vanish away. In his intercourse with this group of friends he seems utterly unconscious of the exalted station which he occupied in the eyes of men. Take such a story as Erasmus tells of a visit of Dean Colet to Lambeth. The Dean took Erasmus in the boat with him, and read as they rowed along a section called 'The Remedy for Anger' in his friend's popular 'Handbook of the Christian Soldier.' When they reached the hall however Colet plumped gloomily down by Warham's side, neither eating nor drinking nor speaking in spite of the Archbishop's good-humoured attempt to draw him into conversation. It was only by starting the new topic of a comparison of ages that the Archbishop was at last successful; and when dinner was over Colet's ill-temper had utterly fled. Erasmus saw him draw aside an old man who had shared their board, and engage in the friendliest greeting. "What a fortunate fellow you are!" began the impetuous Dean, as the two friends stepped again into their boat; "what a tide of good-luck you bring with you!" Erasmus, of course, protested (one can almost see the half-earnest, half-humorous smile on his lip) that he was the most unfortunate fellow on earth. He was at any rate a bringer of good fortune to his friends, the Dean retorted; one friend at least he had saved from an unseemly outbreak of passion. At the Archbishop's table, in fact, Colet had found himself placed opposite to an uncle with whom he had long waged a bitter family feud, and it was only the singular chance which had brought him thither fresh from the wholesome lessons of the 'Handbook' that had enabled the Dean to refrain at the moment from open quarrel, and at last to get such a full mastery over his temper as to bring about a reconciliation with his kinsman. Colet was certainly very lucky in his friend's lessons, but he was perhaps quite as fortunate in finding a host so patient and good-tempered as Archbishop Warham.