10 ERASMUS January he writes to Aldus Manutius expressing surprise that he had not so far published the New Testament.^ It is clear that while Italy, and the Aldine Press as suiting Italian taste, were chiefly interested in secular literature, Erasmus was already absorbed in sound theology and sacred learning. But Rome he rightly held, as his correspondents did, to be the common fatherland of learned men.^ But save for the friends ^ he made and his visit to the Aldine Press, Italy had been a disappointment. At Rome he might have stayed for good, and in Sicily he might at a later time have become a bishop, but the lines of his life would have had to be greatly altered in such a case. At Venice he visited the press of Aldus, and (as I am told is sometimes done even now) he pretended there to be only an agent for Erasmus without full power to treat for him. The generosity of the publisher-printer, however, did away with the need for any such subterfuge ; he stayed there some time and the third edition of his Adages appeared as the result. Venice had also made him bedfellow of Aleander, a much-admired cosmopolitan scholar, whom he at first highly esteemed and recommended but whom at a later date he thought to be the centre of a conspiracy against him. In the end, however, the promises of Italian help remained mere promises, and the discomforts of the journey, with the oppressive stoves in the inns, with the mixed company in them, and with more than a suspicion of garlic, remained to the fastidious scholar a horrible memory, revealed in the Colloquies. It was on the return journey, moving towards his friend More in England, that he planned the Encomium Moriae, which was written in a week * after his arrival (1509). In Italy he had added to the Greek which he had learnt both at Oxford and by himself, and he had also received the hall-mark of a doctor's degree from the university of Turin.* It was small wonder that his fellow monks at Stein should urge such a celebrated brother to return to their fold. But brighter and more congenial prospects were now opening before him : ' mountains of gold were offered ' him, and at a later date he says he could not have lived had it not been for the help so freely sent from England.* Scholars there seemed to have come to their own, for Henry VIII, who when ' Nolhac, p. 98 ; Allen, i. 438.
- Riario to Erasmns : * Roma communis literatorum omnium et patria est et
aUrix et euectrix ' (1515): Allen, ii. 118.
- John Watson, writing to Erasmus in 1516, says he found Erasmus celebrated in
Italy, and that people were proud to have met him. See Nichols, ii. 334 ; Allen, ii. 3Uf.
- See Nichols, ii. 5 ; Allen, i. 459 and ii. 94.
- Not Bologna: see Nolhac, Arasme en Italie, pp. 9-10; Nichols, i. 24, 28, and
417.
- On Erasmus's d^ree at Cambridge, into which the late Dr. Searle of Queens'
College made researches, see Allen, vol. i, app. vi.
