oves. Perhaps it was the impressions dating from his youth at
Deventer that made him so excessively afraid of the plague, which in
those days raged practically without intermission. Faustus Andrelinus
sent a servant to upbraid him in his name with cowardice: 'That would be
an intolerable insult', Erasmus answers, 'if I were a Swiss soldier, but
a poet's soul, loving peace and shady places, is proof against it'. In
the spring of 1501 he leaves Paris once more for fear of the plague:
'the frequent burials frighten me', he writes to Augustine.

He travelled first to Holland, where, at Steyn, he obtained leave to
spend another year outside the monastery, for the sake of study; his
friends would be ashamed if he returned, after so many years of study,
without having acquired some authority. At Haarlem he visited his friend
William Hermans, then turned to the south, once again to pay his
respects to the Bishop of Cambray, probably at Brussels. Thence he went
to Veere, but found no opportunity to talk to his patroness. In July
1501, he subsided into quietness at the castle of Tournehem with his
faithful friend Batt.

In all his comings and goings he does not for a moment lose sight of his
ideals of study. Since his return from England he is mastered by two
desires: to edit Jerome, the great Father of the Church, and,
especially, to learn Greek thoroughly. 'You understand how much all this
matters to my fame, nay, to my preservation,' he writes (from Orleans
towards the end of 1500) to Batt. But, indeed, had Erasmus been an
ordinary fame and success hunter he might have had recourse to plenty of
other expedients. It was the ardent desire to penetrate to the source
and to make others understand that impelled him, even when he availed
himself of these projects of study to raise a little money. 'Listen,' he
writes to Batt, 'to what more I desire from you. You must wrest a gift
from the abbot (of Saint Bertin). You know the man's disposition; invent
some modest and plausible reason for begging. Tell him that I purpose
something grand, viz., to restore the whole of Jerome, however
comprehensive he may be, and spoiled, mutilated, entangled by the
ignorance of divines; and to re-insert the Greek passages. I venture to
say, I shall be able to lay open the antiquities and the style of
Jerome, understood by no one as yet. Tell him that I shall want not a
few books for the purpose, and moreover the help of Greeks, and that
therefore I re