His enormous industry, the vast store of classical learning which he gradually accumulated, Erasmus shared with others of his day.

In patristic study he may have stood beneath Luther; in originality and profoundness of thought he was certainly inferior to More.

His theology, though he made a greater mark on the world by it than even by his scholarship, he derived almost without change from Colet.

But his combination of vast learning with keen observation, of acuteness of remark with a lively fancy, of genial wit with a perfect good sense--his union of as sincere a piety and as profound a zeal for rational religion as Colet's with a dispassionate fairness towards older faiths, a large love of secular culture, and a genial freedom and play of mind--this union was his own, and it was through this that Erasmus embodied for the Teutonic peoples the quickening influence of the New Learning during the long scholar-life which began at Paris and ended amidst sorrow and darkness at Basle.

At the time of Colet's return from Italy Erasmus was young and comparatively unknown, but the chivalrous enthusiasm of the new movement breaks out in his letters from Paris, whither he had wandered as a scholar.